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C. K Stead was Professor of English at the University of Auckland until 1986. He is known to students of literature as the author of The New Poetic, a study of Yeats, Eliot and the Georgian poets. He is the only New Zealand writer to have won the New Zealand Book Award for both poetry and fiction, which latter he has won twice for All Vistiors Ashore and The Singing Whakapapa. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 1984 he was awarded the C.B.E. for services to New Zealand Literature.
There are writers whose prose positively burnishes the page: masters of language who afford the reader the keenest pleasure in their books from the merest phrase to the perfect arc of a keenly wrought chapter. C K Stead is among that august company, and his reputation as one of today's finest novelists grows apace with every book. This is a prime example of his art: compact and lean, there is nevertheless more brilliantly achieved writing in these pages than in many a novel three times its length. This is a study of a bohemian community. On the Takapuna shoreline of Auckland, the artist Farbro cultivates his garden, Cecilia Skyways practises her own version of Zen Buddhism in his garden hut, and the aspiring novelist Curl Skidmore conjures the great novels he is to write and dreams of great love... and great sex. And while the beautiful people live out their arcadian fantasies, the real world edges ever closer, with the harbourfront strike of 1952 soon affording them a rude awakening - and the knowledge that not all of life's problems may be solved by art. There are echoes of D H Lawrence in Stead's rarefied community here, but the characters are painted with individuality and freshness, while the Auckland locale is presented as a key element in the book, and vividly evoked. Stead's cast of acutely drawn characters are led on a delicious galliard by their witty and wise author, with his tale at turns funny, allusive and dramatic. Readers with a taste for the very best contemporary writing should do themselves the favour of making Stead's acquaintance. (Kirkus UK)
