In his new bachelor flat, too close to comfort to his former family home, Mike Newall, Oxford don & Wittgenstein scholar seeks to rebuild his life, but feels increasingly weighed down by the past.

When Donovan O' Dwyer, his colleague & fellow expatriate New Zealander dies, Newall attends the funeral. Afterwards, Newall reveals to his old friend Bertie Winterstoke the secret that O' Dwyer carried with him to his grave. During the battle for Crete in the Second World War, a soldier in New Zealand's Maori battalion died in harrowing circumstances. Believing his commanding officer, O' Dwyer, was responsible for the death, the soldier's family placed a makutu, a Maori curse, on him.

Winterstoke demands to be told all, & in the days that follow Newall obliges. But Newall's life & O' Dwyer's are curiously interconnected & Newall finds that he must interweave O' Dwyer's tale with his own
- his childhood in New Zeal&, his self imposed exile in Oxford, his marriage & divorce, the pilgrimage recently made to Croatia & the promise of a new beginning that this may hold. Gradually, through a series of entwined stories, beautifully told, reflecting on decades of war & of peace, on memory & its failures, & on language & its limitations, Mike Newall comes to see a way of laying the ghosts of O' Dwyer's
- & his own
- past to rest.






...

Alan Bennett sealed his reputation as the master of observation with this series of 12 groundbreaking monologues, originally filmed for BBC Television.

At once darkly comic, tragically poignant & wonderfully uplifting, Talking Heads is widely regarded as a modern classic.

This new edition, which contains the complete collection of Talking Heads, as well as his earlier monologue, A Woman of No Importance, is a celebration of Alan Bennett



...

Safe houses & secret message drops, double crosses & defections
- it sounds like the stuff of sophisticated espionage, but the
...

Safe houses & secret message drops, double crosses & defections
- it sounds like the stuff of sophisticated espionage, but the
...

Be careful what you wish for...

Andi is short. & she has lots of wishes. She wishes she could play on the school basketball

...

Be careful what you wish for...

Andi is short. & she has lots of wishes. She wishes she could play on the school basketball

...