Frenchman Jacques Revel arrives in Bleston (a thinly disguised, reimagined Manchester) to begin work as a shipping clerk. Lost under the spell of a dark, dank, labyrinthine metropolis, he endeavours to solve the puzzle of an attempted murder. We follow his erratic odyssey in diary form as a growing sense of unease envelops him and mysterious fires erupt throughout the city. Passing Time, originally published in France as 'L'emploi du temps' (1956), is the great, lost Manchester novel, a book of enormous imagination and vitality. Melding Greek myth and Proustian method to formulate a brilliant study of alienation and the nebulousness of memory. A work that attempts to excavate Britain's proto-capitalist past and industrial forebears—interrogating their affect on modernity and the human soul. 'L'Emploi du temps' won the 1957 Fénéon Prize.