Time's Fool begins on a stalled train, where Edmund Lea has been stuck for a very long time indeed. A late-twentieth-century, rail-borne reincarnation 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 Mariner for the new century, Time's Fool is the most ambitious and uncompromising work Glyn Maxwell has yet prodeuced - vertiginous, febrile, often darkly comic, and always infused with an almost unbearable nostalgia.