Glyn Maxwell

In this book of poetry, Maxwell returns to the extended verse narrative he employed in Time's Fool, to juxtapose two cities on the brink of irrevocable change. The book begins when the poet steps into an uptown Manhattan bar a few days before September 11, 2001. He is confronted by a regular, a fellow British expatriate. It has been almost exactly sixty-one years since London's "Black Saturday," the start of the worst of the Blitz during World War II. Joe is a survivor of the bombing, and his insistent story brings his lost neighbors back to share the terror and the peculiar beauty blooming in the chaos of their last days. The bartender interrupts to brag about New York's wonders--as we begin to understand that the city soon will face its own catastrophic moment in history.--From publisher description.

"Edmund Lea perpetually rides a ghost train - except every seven years on Christmas Eve, when he is allowed to revisit his home town.". "Like Wagner's Flying Dutchman, Edmund is condemned to eternity alone until he determines how to lift the curse upon him. Time passes, from 1970 to 2019, but Edmund remains seventeen, unable to age and watching the world grow older. He tries in vain to break the spell by way of true love, repentance, hedonism; he tries to change the world and he tries to die. Characters move in and out of Maxwell's story like Dante's figures in Hell, but Edmund's own Virgil is a careless and unhelpful poet, a portrait of the author as a student."--BOOK JACKET.

"A series of verse letters to the English poet Edward Thomas, killed in the First World War, forms the centerpiece of this new collection. Like most of the poems, it expresses a deep concern for England, past and present. Other poems, whether lyrical or narrative, comic or contemplative, explore love and fatherhood, triumph and longing. Some are adventures from the known to the ineffable; some draw on the poet's travels and his new home in Amherst, Massachusetts. The title poem's sharp depiction of loss introduces a volume whose range of form and mood is as surprising and vigorous as that of Maxwell's literary forebears - Auden, Larkin, and even Robert Frost, whose time in both England and America he evokes."--BOOK JACKET.

'Hide Now' is Glyn Maxwell's most direct and personal collection yet. It contains some extremely moving poems, in particular about the breakup of his marriage.

Britain is reeling from reports of a terrorist bomb on a film set that has killed a hundred people and, possibly, the brightest star in Hollywood, Thomas Bayne. Caught up in the middle of the national mourning is Susan Mantle - a rather hopeless tour-guide - who is seen crying on a park bench and is taken up by the media as a symbol of the blitz spirit. She is crying, though, for other reasons: she's just been told by a clairvoyant that she is about to die. Susan is swept into a media maelstrom, becoming the baffled and increasingly unwilling star of reality TV.

"April 1793, the French Revolution is four years old and the Committee of Public Safety under Robespierre finds threats to national liberty at home and abroad. When Gamelin, an ambitious and idealistic young magistrate, joins a group of old friends for a picnic outside Paris, the ties of love and affection can take the strain. But how strong will they prove when Gamelin is given power over life and death, and the new republic plunges from high idealism to mob rule and state terror? Private jealousies and public fears, old alliances and new ideologies, panic legislation and political correctness all combine in this thrilling adaptation of Anatole France's 1912 novel Les Dieux ont Soif."--Publisher description.

Dash Davenport's feelings against marriage are further complicated by his profession as a divorce attorney and his own failed relationship. Savannah Charles believes in marriage, especially since she operates a bridal business. In Laughter in the rain, Abby Carpenter has been involved with predictable, practical Logan Fletcher for years. One day she meets the unpredictable, impractical Tate Harding. Does an everyday guy like Logan have a chance against a handsome stranger like Tate?