The main character of C. K. Stead's sophisticated and entertaining new novel is Laszlo Winter, a writer from New Zealand with 'narrative habits tending to the structural character of a Russian doll'. If this sounds like Stead himself, so does Laszlo's comment that his books have been about 'the 50 years of human history I had lived through with an adult consciousness, and how the earlier 50, which I knew by reading and report, bore upon them'. Dispirited by the sense that age and geography have rendered him marginal, he is suffering from writer's block. Then he is visited by someone who reminds him of Sammy Conlan, an Australian girl he knew when he was a postgraduate student in London in the late Fifties, and a book starts to form.

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