Talking About O’Dwyer

Two Oxford dons, Newall and Winterstoke, attend their colleague's funeral. Afterward Newall reveals the secret that O'Dwyer took to the grave. During the Battle of Crete in World War II a Maori soldier died in circumstances that led to his family placing a curse on O'Dwyer. How did the soldier die? Why was O'Dwyer responsible? Gradually Newall tells all. But as he moves in space and time—from his childhood in New Zealand to Crete, from Oxford to Croatia, reflecting on wartime and peacetime, and the generations that have lived through both—it becomes clear that the story is not just O'Dwyer's, but Newall's as well.