The Singing Whakapapa (Penguin Award Winning Classics)

'Life enhancing – that is the dominant sense this impressive novel leaves one with. Stead's 'best work of fiction for years' is how the dust-jacket puts it. Simply his best, I believe.' — Ken Arvidson, Sunday Star Times

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'The Singing Whakapapa' will surprise many of Stead's critics by its content and humanity. It is a novel marinated in our colonial experience and one which skilfully uses the past to illuminate the present. It is Stead's best novel since All Visitors Ashore.' — Graeme Lay, North and South

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'The Singing Whakapapa is highly readable for its intriguing story and its masterful prose – written beautifully, with the usual Stead humour and finesse.' — Kirsten Lawson, Otago Daily Times

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'The Singing Whakapapa is an important work, both a social and historical commentary, and, perhaps more significantly, a literary achievement of great skill and wit.' — Frank Harper, Bay of Plenty Times

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'Stead is so readable. Like Keri Hulme he is a poet who keeps his head in prose. Of our best-known novelists, only Frame and Hulme write as well. His pages resonate with a sensual enjoyment of life which is strongly attractive.' — Kai Jenson, Print-out

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'The novel follows the search of a man for 'pattern, colour, harmony, a warp and a weft' who discovers 'that in the end there may only be a great granny knot of time and circumstance.' Above all this is a beautifully written and lucidly constructed book. Stead has always been a master of the sentence, and here he excels himself. Layers of sense, implication, sound and resonance are melded together in passages that recall his poetry.' — Mark Williams, Landfall

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