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Once upon a time in a Middle Eastern land, the ruler had two sons, the first still-born, so they said. The younger, a fat, thoughtful, sweet-natured boy was his heir. Far from the capital there are rumours of a creature, half boy, half beast, that roams the forests. A rich lonely prospector finds the creature, and brings him up as his son. The creature learns to talk after a fashion and to move almost normally. From his shady garden he looks longingly at the pretty girl, whose father keeps her in seclusion next door, and secretly she too spies on him. His own shameful secret is the extra limbs that seem to wave from his chest. When his protector dies, the boy is kidnapped and displayed in a travelling freak show, where his facial likeness to the young prince is remarked.

Throughout his long and prolific career, John Fuller has been admired for the way in which he melds levity with serious reflection. In this beautiful new collection of twenty-one poems he proves himself, once again, a true master of this art. They take us from birth to death: from a baby's first delightful babblings, to the dignified, measured words of a man surveying his life and marriage, and looking forward into the unknown. There are moments of great joie de vivre, of pleasure in the earthy things of life; and yet, beyond, there is always a sense of a vaster, more elusive universe. The snorting of the horses in a field in 'Dreams', the egret on the rock in 'Sentinel': these are nature's mysteries. To make sense of these, we have language and music. Celebratory, playful, reconciled to the questions that will not be answered, these poems exude a miraculous kind of peace and understanding: 'A point of closure that allows the next/Inevitable sentence to begin.'

The Space of Joy is a sequence of poems that recounts the endless desire for love (and the failures and compromises that accompany that desire) in a number of writers and musicians who fatally prioritise their art. It begins with Petrarch, who created great lyric poetry out of an impossible infatuation, and moves through Coleridge's self-induced guilt within domestic happiness, Matthew Arnold's disbelief in mutual love, Brahm's self-delusion and the complexities of Wallace Stevens's marriage. It so happens that both Brahms and Arnold found themselves contemplating their art and their lives in the small Swiss town of Thun, and it is Thun that provides the setting for the wonderful concluding poem of this collections in which Fuller thinks back to his own boyood and his parents' marriage. If there is any resolution in this sequence of magnificently playful and thought-provoking poems, it is the conviction that while 'poetry may be the only heaven we have', it is life itself that must create the 'space of joy' which art wishes to celebrate.

Set in Beirut, this is an astonishing novel of drama and intrigue set against the backdrop of civil warfare in the Lebanon. Reem is 20, bright and strikingly attractive. Nick is 27 and determined to do what he can to make the world a better place. But when they meet in a fashionable bar it is certainly no accident. For Reem has completed her training as a so-called terrorist - under the tutelage of the mysterious Ustaz, or teacher, and Nicholas Lorimer is her first assignment. It is Nick's first posting abroad. The UN has sent him to Beirut to help trace thousands of Lebanese missing during the country's civil war and Nick has what Reem needs; access out of the city's besieged western sector into the mainly Christian east, and to a notorious rightwing warlord with his sights set on the country's presidency. For Reem, the fight is personal. She has lost her family and home. She volunteers for the ultimate mission - an Operation of Quality. A suicide attack. Nick's love for Reem explodes the bubble of foreignness that has kept him unscathed by the war. Once he realises the truth, he must choose between Reem and what his contacts at the British embassy insist is his duty.