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Maxwell is one of the brightest stars in the recent resurgence of British poetry. The Boys at Twilight draws on his three Bloodaxe collections. 'Maxwell writes not only about suburbia and its effect on the psyche, but about the boy in the man tough, elegant lines' - nick hornby.

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 London tour-guide - who is seen crying on a park bench and is taken up by the media as a symbol of the blitz spirit, appearing on the rolling news with the headline 'beautiful but crying'. She is crying, though, for other reasons: she's just been told by a clairvoyant that she is about to die. Reason and the real world are quickly relinquished as Susan is swept into a media maelstrom, becoming the baffled and increasingly unwilling star of reality TV. Buffeted by the demands of her new public, and her private terrors about her own mortality, Susan starts to lose control of everything.

A topical and accessible collection, The Sugar Mile takes its readers on a journey from wartime London to modern-day America. In a series of monologues, each beautifully drawn and intimate, Glyn Maxwell details the effects and experiences of conflict: the sense of community bounded by a distrust of strangers and foreigners; whole streets razed to the ground; homes lost, possessions misplaced and characters displaced; fears for loved-ones offset by tentative bargains with god; casual encounters given an intense, unreal edge by the context in which they occur; the routine drama and unfamiliar 'everydayness' of bombs, blackouts, shelters, temporary accommodation and evacuation... With painstaking clarity and honesty, Maxwell has captured the surrealism of a world under siege - whether WWII or the war on terror declared post 9/11.