The theme of the three stories that make up John Fraser's brilliant new literary tour de force 'Animal Tales' is sacrifice. Sacrifice for others, for those close to one, or as a once-religious, generalised act. The context is a nature 'personalised' in the form of its animals - animals as the screen on which humans project their aspirations and their failures. In the first tale, the female protagonist suffers a series of disappointments - in her art, her civilisation, and the violation of her body. There remains for her only the self-denial and cleansing of consumption by an animal. In 'The White Room', the hero betrays trusts and friendships, culminating in the seduction of his friend's wife. The gift of an animal seems to unload the guilt and treachery on to the beast itself. The Guardians are the fantastic terra cotta animals that guard Chinese tombs. A powerful boss tries to salve his soul through a deal with nature. Only the lifeless guardian statues hide the void, however. The living animals are let down - along with the humans themselves.

Hard Places consists of three novellas, Red Snow, The Rock and The Sea. They concern human struggles with Nature and human natures. Red Snow involves efforts to have the better of chance by gaming, and the forms of self-discipline this requires. The Rock shows the eternal certainties of art crumbling into inexplicable absences and shady deals. The Sea evokes our longing for sumbersion in nature when we wish to coneal our misdeeds and rejections.

A novel set during a critical point in Soviet history, whose protagonists are young Soviet intellectuals, bright but not brilliant, confronting a future threatened with war and stagnation, but still with the impetus of post-Stalinist regeneration. It is not a chronicle of that period's debates between neo-Bolsheviks, Leninists, social and liberal democrats, Trotskyists, Westernisers and traditionalists. It depicts a more modest but more frequently encountered search for commitment, for a meaningful political and social life, in a vast country where light and darkness flicker and alternate unpredictably. Although it may be categorised as political fantasy, the real fantasy lies in the collapse of the aspirations which drove all the protagonists at the time.

John Fraser's Medusa is a stunning fable for our times, in which the stories of Medusa, the Gorgon and the French ship Medusa are intertwined to create a Pilgrim's Progress for the 21st century. 'Medusa is a trip, a bending of the legends. It is a symphonic poem, where at the end, we even hear a few notes of a hymn to joy. The fragments of myth, legend and belief drift round like harmonies that seek resolution. But this mode is post-modern, post-Christian; it is about the end - yet there is no end: it is story. The resulting tale is an apocryphal blast and a literary tour de force that uncannily captures the zeitgeist.' (Jean-Paul Bouler) 'In Fraser's fiction the reader rides as on a switchback or luge of impetuous attention, with effects flashing by at virtuoso speeds. The characters seem to be unwitting agents of chaos, however much wise reflection Fraser bestows upon them; they move with shrugging self-assurance through circumstances as richly detailed and as without reliable compass-points as a Chinese scroll.' (John Fuller)

In Runners John Fraser delivers, in his unique, distinct voice, the story of a kind of redemption - even a kind of utopia - or as much of a utopia as we can possibly expect, given what we know about most of our political leaders ... An unelected leader buys the office of deputy mayor. Although this 'boss' is a monster, he also has a rare, enlightened side. Where other leaders cling to power, he runs - but instead of running for office, he runs from office; he and his friends become the Runners - the running dogs. Runners is a contemporary remake of Machiavelli's Prince with a nod to Gramsci's 'Modern Prince', the revolutionary party. It is a tale of complicity between leaders, the nature of political friendships and loyalties, the contradictions between leaders and electors, between democratic rhetoric and practice, the leadership and the base - the urban and feathered - the volatility, adaptability and motivations of leaders, and of the pursuit of justice in the personal, incongruous instance; the machismo of political culture. 'In Fraser's fiction the reader rides as on a switchback or luge of impetuous attention, with effects flashing by at virtuoso speeds. The characters seem to be unwitting agents of chaos, however much wise reflection Fraser bestows upon them; they move with shrugging self-assurance through circumstances as richly detailed and as without reliable compass-points as a Chinese scroll.' (John Fuller)

Two novellas by John Fraser, Blue Light and Starting Over, conclude a quadrilogy whose previous volumes comprised The Red Tank, Runners and Medusa. We may like to imagine what the end of the world is like - it's not dissimilar to our own end. Blue Light shows what it's like, the running down, the onset of rigor mortis - and the new life sprouting, notwithstanding. Living for ever may not be too bad - but do you really want it? When the world has ended, how attractive is rebirth, or resurrection? Starting Over may mean you have to piece a whole new world together - just using the ruins of the past. The poet John Fuller writes: 'In Fraser's fiction the reader rides as on a switchback or luge of impetuous attention, with effects flashing by at virtuoso speeds. The characters seem to be unwitting agents of chaos, however much wise reflection Fraser bestows upon them; they move with shrugging self-assurance through circumstances as richly detailed and as without reliable compass-points as a Chinese scroll.'

A novel about political commitment and liberation, set around the year 1968 and reflecting the high season of Guevara in Bolivia and attempts to insert a revolutionary 'foco' in places where objective conditions were politically ripe, but where the subjective element, and the most rudimentary organisation, were absent. The would-be, self-transforming saviour pays with his life (and that of his comrades) in a situation where rectitude is on his side but the situation quite beyond his reach. Instead of violence, this political fable presents organisation, as against movimentismo, as a possible vehicle for the chiliastic transformation.