Böcker av John Muckle

Rob Goddard knew he shouldn't be travelling during a national lockdown, but it was Xmas and he headed West to see his family anyway. At Waterloo, the train seemed completely empty; perhaps it was, but an exploratory walk revealed at least four other passengers. All dead. They were ghosts. People he'd known; people who had died far too young.At first a convivial reunion, the journey's mood changed when four more travellers embarked, mutating further when two of them hatched into enormous dragonflies, meganeura, extinct for hundreds of millions of years. Rob, a poet, was reminded of the dragonflies that 'draw flame' in Gerard Manley Hopkins' famous sonnet. But these angelic giants possessed many different powers. Also, ominously, it had begun to snow heavily.Snow Bees is an apocalyptic novel with a difference, a roller coaster to the end of the night, a story in which hilarity rubs shoulders with death, and poetry rescues memory: a world apparently charging headlong towards oblivion in the plot of heaven.

'Firewriting' is John Muckle's first collection of poems, following two collections of short fiction. The book revolves around the long title poem, an extraordinary conceit which imagines that Walter Benjamin survived and lived to an advanced age. This and the supporting poems demonstrate the author's narrative skills.

In stories varying from a funeral eulogy to a compelling wartime romance, Late Driver tells of a number of surprising lives imagined in out of the way places; the mood is restless, probing, suffused with memories and loss - although some rivet-hole stars still let in the light of the young women who first punched them into an empty sky.

This exciting and readable book presents the fifties and sixties as a crucible of new departures, asking what remains and continues from those decades into the cultural present. It takes the form of a series of thematic essays each of which discusses the work of an individual or group of novelists.