Time's Fool — Glyn Maxwell

Often hailed as the most technically gifted and stylish of the younger English poets. Maxwell has delivered a great work Time's Fool begins on a stalled train, where Edmund Lea has been stuck for a very long time indeed. A late 20th century, rail-borne reincamation of the Flying Dutchman, Edmund remains eternally locked in his hellish circuit - with the exception of one day in every seven years, when the train pulls into his home town, and he must attempt to unravel the nature of his curse. Somewhere between a very English Inferno and an Ancient Manner for the new century, Time's Fool is the most ambitious and uncompromising work Glyn Maxwell has yet delivered - vertiginous, febrile, often darkly comic, and always infused with an almost unbearable nostalgia.