Life as a Novel

Through his fiction, non-fiction and international journalism, Maurice Shadbolt played a leading role in projecting New Zealand to the world throughout the second half of the 20th century.

In Volume Two, Philip Temple tells of Shadbolt's epic coverage of the W.B. Sutch spy trial, his journalistic probes into the Arthur Allan Thomas case and the Erebus disaster, and his involvement in protests against the 1981 Springbok rugby tour. He tells of Shadbolt's demolition of the myths surrounding the Gallipoli campaign with his ground-breaking play Once on Chunuk Bair and subsequent documentary work.

Temple also explores Shadbolt's growing stature as a novelist, which produced such works as the unique The Lovelock Version and culminated in his New Zealand Wars trilogy, begun with the now New Zealand classic, Season of the Jew.

Philip Temple also concludes the story of Shadbolt's fraught personal life as, by the end, he had been married four times and been involved in many affairs. It is a fascinating but ultimately tragic story about a man who had become New Zealand's most well-known and controversial author.