The love that might have been Following a distinguished and prolific career as a literary critic, C K Stead has written more than 10 novels in as many years. His latest book touches on recurrent themes - the remoteness of his native New Zealand, the relationship of individual lives to history. It is also grounded in one of Stead's main academic interests, the world of the Modernists. The book juggles three narratives that have "the structural character of a Russian doll". In the outermost, the celebrated New Zealand author Laszlo Winter (a thinly veiled alter ego) describes how he overcomes writer's block through a chance meeting that returns him to his past. Laszlo's memories of life as an aspiring academic in post-war, post-imperial London form the main narrative. Here we meet a set of bookish ex-colonials. Rajiv is an earnest Indian researching theses on Eliot and Yeats. Intellectual Margot and her athletic brother Mark are possibly incestuous New Zealanders studying at Oxford. But centre-stage is Sam, a beautiful, spirited Australian, who is in London to escape her Jewish lover, Freddy Goldstein, and to write a Secret History of Modernism. She is Laszlo's muse, his love that might have been. Stead's writing is meticulous and elegant, despite being fraught with "quotations from the masters" and sorties into literary biography and criticism. The relationships between fiction and autobiography, and author and narrator, are explored through clever authorial games reminiscent of postmodernist writers such as Borges and Calvino. As the book opens, Laszlo