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Time's fool

Glyn Maxwell

2000300 pagesabout 5–7 hours
2000
first published
  • 2000Houghton Mifflin · 396 pages · ENGISBN 9780618073887
  • 2001Picador · 300 pages · ENGISBN 9780330485449
  • 2002Mariner Books · 416 pages · ENGISBN 9780618257560

"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.

How it feels

How it reads

Character focusSingle lead

When and where

Reading situationBedtime
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