Late Driver (Paperback or Softback)

Pauline is at the end of her life, wool-gathering in a chair, but simultaneously in her prime, driving between dress shops in her blue Opel Kadett; Eileen Platt, an American nurse, is stationed on a remote airfield - known as Mudville - in the Blackdown Hills, Devon, her duties to patch up returning aircrew of Liberator bombers. She doesn't want to go home to Des Moines after the war. She wants to stay in England.

Near the old airfield a family play out their last moves in a place superficially unchanged, in a country whose old order is breaking up, slipping past proper recall. Richie's rotting Jags and Daimlers no longer run; women still care for men, sometimes may be cared for in turn - but sometimes the cars may change without warning, and wasps swarm madly out of the jar.

In stories varying in size and manner 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.

John Muckle was born in Cobham, Surrey, but has lived most of his life in Essex and London. In the 1980s he initiated the Paladin Poetry Series and was General Editor of its flagship anthology, The New British Poetry (Paladin, 1988). His previous books include The Cresta Run (short stories), Cyclomotors (a novella with photo illustrations), Firewriting and Other Poems (Shearsman Books, 2005), three novels, also from Shearsman, London Brakes (2010), My Pale Tulip (2012), Falling Through (2017), Mirrorball (poems, 2018) and a new critical study of British fiction in the 1950s and 1960s, Little White Bull (Shearsman, 2014).