About this book:

Time of Passing, the fifth volume of John Gaskin’s acclaimed ‘Tales of Twilight and Borderlands’, contains nine entirely new stories, along with four which first appeared in a previous collection and an anthology. Infused with an almost uncanny understanding of things past and to come, and enlivened by touches of sardonic humour, John Gaskin’s stories are firmly in the tradition of the classic English ghost story and tales of the unknown.

A sense of place is always strongly present, as is the influence of the author’s Classical scholarship. Some stories feature academics and Oxford colleges, but also, in ‘Time of Passing’, lock keepers on the River Isis in Oxford. The beautiful wilds of Northumberland and the hazards they pose for the unwary or unlucky, are the setting for ‘Cropsey’s Hole’. In the elegiac ‘The Sea’, time itself drives the narrative.

Contains: ‘Foreword’, ‘Time of Passing’, ‘The Stone Guest’, ‘The Second Master’, ‘Avernus’, ‘The Gathering’, ‘The New Member’, ‘Dead Hands’, ‘Blaeweary’, ‘The Return of Fire’, ‘On a Summer Night’, ‘Cropsey’s Hole’, ‘The Sea’, ‘Last Words’

About the author:

As well as A Traveller’s Guide to Classical Philosophy (Thames & Hudson, 2011 & 2019), academic books on philosophy, and a full length mystery novel, A Doubt of Death (2011), John Gaskin has previously published four vividly atmospheric and disturbing collections of ‘Tales of Twilight and Borderlands’: The Dark Companion (Dublin, 2001), The Long Retreating Day (Tartarus, 2006), The Master of the House (Tartarus, 2014) and The New Inn Hall Deception (Tartarus 2019).

John Gaskin was educated at the City of Oxford High School and Oxford University. Having had employment with British Railways, the Thames Conservancy, and as the first graduate trainee in the Royal Bank of Scotland, he took a lectureship at Trinity College Dublin where he became a Fellow, Junior Dean at the height of the troubles, and held a personal chair in philosophy. He retired in 1997 to write and travel. He is married with two children, five grandchildren and a cat. In 1997 he was awarded a Doctor of Letters and is an honorary Fellow of Hatfield College, Durham.