All Visitors Ashore

Description

Once he watched the white ships sail past Rangitoto Island and dreamed of a future beyond New Zealand. Now he wants only to recapture the past. An Auckland community: two not-so-faithful restaurant-running musicians, a gay artist and his lodger, the recently electrified Cecilia Skyways who is writing her memoirs in his garden hut, Patagonia Aorewa de Thierry Bennett, an enigma otherwise known as plain Pat Bennett, and Curl Skidmore, the narrator's alter ego, his brilliant young head full of novels waiting to be unravelled, his trousers full of something much more irrepressible. It is 1951 and the harbourfront strike is on, yet the passenger ships still sail: the wider world beckons. One by one, or two by two, the characters leave the stage, until only the narrator is left, trying to capture his memories over a gap of thirty years.

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.

Poetic, funny and very enjoyable. -- Richard Francis * Times Literary Supplement * It seems incontestable to me that C.K. Stead is among the very best contemporary novelists. -- John De Fable * Spectator *