Outsider Looking In

“This smart and sophisticated novel by prolific New Zealand writer C.K. Stead surveys the atrocities of our time – the attacks on the US on September 11, 2001, the Balkan and Iraq wars, the London bombings of 2007, the global financial crisis – from the perspective of an onlooker, an outsider indeed: an attendant lord as Shakespeare (whom Stead likes quoting) would have put it,” Sydney Morning Herald reviewer Andrew Reimer writes about Stead’s latest novel, Risk. “The publication of Risk marks its author’s 80th birthday. Happily, there has been no diminution in Stead’s wit, skill and alertness.”