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.

Glyn Maxwell has won several awards for his poetry, including the Somerset Maugham Prize, the E. M. Forster Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. His work has been shortlisted for the Whitbread, Forward and T. S. Eliot Prizes. Many of his plays have been staged in the UK and USA, including The Lifeblood, which won British Theatre Guide's `Best Play' Award at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2004, and Liberty, which premiered at Shakespeare's Globe in 2008. He recently published On Poetry, a general reader's guide to the craft.