ABOUT
THE BOOK

A chance meeting has New Zealand writer Laszlo Winter thinking back to his time in London in the late 1950s. The Empire might be in a state of collapse, but for young “colonials”, England remains a mythical place that draws them form the farthest corners of the globe.
There was Australian Samantha Conlan, clever, desirable, hopelessly in love with married Jewish New Zealander Freddy Goldstein, who carried with him a dark history. Rajiv, earnest young Indian at work on a study of Yeats and the deeps of the Indian mind. The enigmatic Margot, whose bond with her athletic brother Mark troubled Laszlo in ways he didn’t quite understand. Heather, the call girl, with whom Laszlo exchanged lessons on Shakespeare for lessons in love. Maltese Mr. Spitfire and How Repulsive the fishmonger who shared Laszlo’s digs. The great writers of the time, and the details of their lives recorded by Samantha in her idiosyncratic research project that she named her Secret History of Modernism. There was all that, and more – and there was Laszlo, knocking blindly about among them in that far-distant past that was London before the 1960s, despairing at his academic prospects, and gradually realising that he was, would only ever be, a storyteller.
Now, year later, from the other side of the world, from the other side of the millennium, the people seem to spring to life again. But the truth of what became of them, and how much is the fabric of fiction, only Laszlo can know.