The Singing Whakpapa is a tale for our time - a compelling historical detective story in which the truth is stranger than any fiction, and in which the present becomes a backseat driver to the past. What is the truth of history, what are the facts - and how are we to know them? This powerful novel is the story of John Flatt - missionary agriculturalist, witness to Waharoa's war of the 1830s against the Arawa, to the murder of the young woman Tarore and to the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi - and his great-great-grandson Hugh Grady, who more than a hundred-and-fifty years later tried to make sense of his own life by exploring all that has gone before. It is a story laced with passion, betrayal and revenge, at many levels, as greed overtakes good intentions and the cloak of history is pulled aside. The Singing Whakapapa won the New Zealand Book Awards in 1995.

opinion, the Guide offers a discriminating - and sometimes controversial - view of a broad range of contemporary literatures.

An old friend, a new character &– C. K. Stead is scribe to love and grief in this beautiful new collection.In two sequences the poet plays with the lines of history and love, the fictional and the autobiographical. Reflecting on a long career and familiar faces, the first sequence walks the reader from classical Rome to contemporary Aotearoa. Then in the shade of Parnell begins a tender address to a new character, Kezia, lover and friend just lost.Lyrical and deeply moving, In the Half Light of a Dying Day is a late-career masterpiece.

The Campus Novel – Regional or Global? presents innovative scholarship in the field of academic fiction. Whereas the campus novel is traditionally considered a product of the Anglo-American world, the present study opens a new perspective: it elucidates the intercultural exchange between the well-established Western canon of British and American academic fiction and its more recent regional response outside the Anglo-American territory.

Having left the university to write full-time at the end of volume two, Stead throws himself into his work. In novels like Sister Hollywood and My Name Was Judas, criticism in the London Review of Books and the Financial Times, poetry and memoir, Stead establishes his international reputation as novelist, poet and critic. It is also a period when Stead's fearless lucidity on matters literary and political embroil him in argument &– from The Bone People to the meaning of the Treaty to the controversy over a London writer's flat.What was it like to be Allen Curnow's designated &‘Critic across the Crescent'; or alternatively to be labelled &‘the Tonya Harding of NZ Lit'? How did poems emerge from time and place, sometimes as naturally as &‘leaves to a tree', sometimes effortfully? And how did novels about individual men and women retell stories of war (World War II, Yugoslavia, Iraq) and peace?Covering Stead's travels from Los Angeles to Liguria, Croatia and Crete to Caracas and Colombia, as New Zealand poet laureate and Kohi swimmer, What You Made of It takes us deep inside the mind and experience of one of our major writers &– and all in Stead's famously lucid &‘story-telling' prose.

This collection of poetry culls Karl Stead’s most lasting and memorable works into a single volume. Drawn from previously published works though his distinguished career, from his debut collection Whether the Will is Free to his recent publication The Black River, this resource also contains 22 previously unpublished poems from his early days.

In Risk, acclaimed New Zealand author C.K. Stead "has the ability to set the scene in a few pithy lines and condense more telling details into a handful of pages than many writers manage in their entire chapters" said the Sunday Times. Recently divorced New Zealand native Sam Nola returns to London, where he spent two years in his early twenties. It is early 2003, and on both sides of Atlantic the case for military intervention in Iraq is being made--or fabricated. But life for Sam has never been better: a grown-up, half-French daughter from a long ago affair has recently got in touch, and he has walked into a lucrative role in the booming banking sector. It is only when he learns of the deaths of two friends within a week that intrigue begins to intrude on his contentment, that life begins to feel a little more precarious.

In his 85th year, C. K. Stead's new collection leads us deep inside the life of the poet. He looks back at his younger self, remembering old loves and cringing at his ‘sonnets' lugubrious rhyming'. He tells us of those who have gone – Derrida (‘that Derrida whom I derided died') and Curnow (‘Allen's as dead now / as an old friend can be which is / hardly at all), Peter Porter and Lucien Freud. And he takes us along with him on the poetical life: from Dogshit Park in Budapest to a Zagreb bookshop to the Christchurch Festival. The collection includes a series of poems written while the author was poet laureate, including a sequence on World War I in which ‘the Ministry' requests poems from our reluctant and sometimes defiant poet laureate.

Every morning for the last thirty years, C. K. Stead has written fiction and poetry. Shelf Life collects the best of his afternoon work: reviews and essays, interviews and diaries, lectures and opinion pieces. In this latest collection, a sequel to the successful Answering to the Language, The Writer at Work, and Book Self, Stead takes the reader through nine essays in ‘the Mansfield file', collects works of criticism and review in ‘book talk', writes in the ‘first person' about everything from David Bain to Parnell, and finally offers some recent reflections on poetic laurels from his time as New Zealand poet laureate. Throughout, Stead is vintage Stead: clear, direct, intelligent, decisive, personal. This is a sequel to the successful Answering to the Language, The Writer at Work, and Book Self. It includes every kind of literary journalism, including politics, education, and reflections on language and some of Stead's laureate blogs which sit between criticism and autobiography. These are further perspectives on New Zealand's literature and culture from the country's leading critic.

Over 3,200 entries An essential guide to authors and their works that focuses on the general canon of British literature from the fifteenth century to the present. There is also some coverage of non-fiction such as biographies, memoirs, and science, as well as inclusion of major American and Commonwealth writers. This online-exclusive new edition adds 60,000 new words, including over 50 new entries dealing with authors who have risen to prominence in the last five years, as well as fully updating the entries that currently exist. Each entry provides details of a writer's nationality and birth/death dates, followed by a listing of their titles arranged chronologically by date of publication.