Misplaced Memories in Moments of Being, is a timely examination of rising uncertainty as a stable world fragments and the inevitably of progress is rejected. 

The book’s immediate attention is on the hope invested in the virtues of a suburban utopia in post-World War Two societies to build the modern world. 

This is a new origins story of people who had emerged from the horrors of war and economic depression to enter an ideal world where lives would continually improve. They seek different forms of paradise as they grapple with events which seem determined and outside their control or subject to the vagaries of chance. 

Ultimately, they become disillusioned as their world increasingly fragments and their hopes and struggles dissolve as the benefits of progress give way to doubt, disruption and uncertainty. 

This is a new approach to historical literature. Instead of the big events in history, Buxton concentrates on ordinary existence, the generally overlooked lives most of us lead. 

Misplaced Memories is Michael Buxton’s second fiction work about post-World War Two suburban life following the release of his novel 1964. He uses a discontinuous narrative in 35 linked short stories. The stories move back and forward in time to explain the nature and role of memory in telling the journeys of ordinary lives in a suburban community from the 1940s to a cataclysmic end in 2001.

His main concern is with the epic nature of ordinary lives and the constant human search for different versions of paradise. His characters initially regard suburban life as a new utopia then grapple with unforeseen issues as they struggle with the lives they have embraced. 

Wartime experiences of both the men and women form the background to tales of personal conflict and the search for identity, meaning and better lives. The emergence of the Vietnam war challenges the confidence in gradual improvement and heightens the questioning of what war has meant to society. This challenge leads to a questioning of traditional beliefs about warfare and the direction of social trends. 

The theme of increasing disruption is explored further through the inevitable assault on nature from suburban expansion. A naïve and idealistic belief in nature unaffected by the human passion for progress accompanies the desolation caused by the human hand. 

Michael Buxton reveals the constant human search for utopias. He examines how our failure to anticipate our own impacts has made an ever-changing world increasingly unpredictable. 

This is a history of us all and our hopes, disappointments, successes and failures that all readers will recognise, humorous, serious, challenging and always fascinating.