Light Perpetual: A Novel
(Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read)
From the critically acclaimed and award‑winning author of Golden Hill, an "extraordinary...symphonic...casually stunning" (The Wall Street Journal) novel tracing the infinite possibilities of five lives in the bustling neighborhoods of 20th-century London.
Lunchtime on a Saturday, 1944: the Woolworths on Bexford High Street in South London receives a delivery of aluminum saucepans. A crowd gathers to see the first new metal in ages—after all, everything's been melted down for the war effort. An instant later, the crowd is gone; incinerated. Among the shoppers were five young children.
Who were they? What futures did they lose? This brilliantly constructed novel, inspired by real events, lets an alternative reel of time run, imagining the lives of these five souls as they live through the extraordinary, unimaginable changes of the bustling immensity of twentieth-century London. Their intimate everyday dramas, as sons and daughters, spouses, parents, grandparents; as the separated, the remarried, the bereaved. Through decades of social, sexual, and technological transformation, as bus conductors and landlords, as swindlers and teachers, patients and inmates. Days of personal triumphs and disasters; of second chances and redemption.
Ingenious and profound, full of warmth and beauty, Light Perpetual "offers a moving view of how people confront the gap between their expectations and their reality" (The New Yorker) and illuminates the shapes of experience, the extraordinariness of the ordinary, the mysteries of memory, and the preciousness of life.
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Francis Spufford. (2021). Light Perpetual: A Novel. Scribner.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Francis Spufford. 2021. Light Perpetual: A Novel. Scribner.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Francis Spufford, Light Perpetual: A Novel. Scribner, 2021.
MLA Citation (style guide)Francis Spufford. Light Perpetual: A Novel. Scribner, 2021.
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- bioText: Francis Spufford began as the author of four highly praised books of nonfiction. His first book, I May Be Some Time, won the Writers' Guild Award for Best Nonfiction Book of 1996, the Banff Mountain Book Prize, and a Somerset Maugham Award. It was followed by The Child That Books Built, Backroom Boys, and most recently, Unapologetic. But with Red Plenty in 2012 he switched to the novel. Golden Hill won multiple literary prizes on both sides of the Atlantic; Light Perpetual was longlisted for the Booker Prize. In England he is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Historical Society. He teaches writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
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- Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, NPR, Slate, Lit Hub, Fresh Air, and more
From the critically acclaimed and award‑winning author of Golden Hill, an "extraordinary...symphonic...casually stunning" (The Wall Street Journal) novel tracing the infinite possibilities of five lives in the bustling neighborhoods of 20th-century London.
Lunchtime on a Saturday, 1944: the Woolworths on Bexford High Street in South London receives a delivery of aluminum saucepans. A crowd gathers to see the first new metal in ages—after all, everything's been melted down for the war effort. An instant later, the crowd is gone; incinerated. Among the shoppers were five young children.
Who were they? What futures did they lose? This brilliantly constructed novel, inspired by real events, lets an alternative reel of time run, imagining the lives of these five souls as they live through the extraordinary, unimaginable changes of the bustling immensity of twentieth-century London. Their intimate everyday dramas, as sons and daughters, spouses, parents, grandparents; as the separated, the remarried, the bereaved. Through decades of social, sexual, and technological transformation, as bus conductors and landlords, as swindlers and teachers, patients and inmates. Days of personal triumphs and disasters; of second chances and redemption.
Ingenious and profound, full of warmth and beauty, Light Perpetual "offers a moving view of how people confront the gap between their expectations and their reality" (The New Yorker) and illuminates the shapes of experience, the extraordinariness of the ordinary, the mysteries of memory, and the preciousness of life. - reviews
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December 1, 2020
In 1944 London, a lethal fire rips through a crowd gathered to gawk at a Woolworths shipment of aluminum saucepans--a rare sight since most metal has been melted down for the war effort--and Spufford imagines how the lives of five children who died in the blaze might have unfolded in a rapidly changing Britain. The esteemed nonfiction writer follows up his Costa, Ondaatje, and Desmond Elliot-winning first novel, Golden Hill.
Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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Starred review from March 22, 2021
Spufford (Golden Hill) spins alternate narratives for five Londoners who died during the London Blitz in this magical yarn. The story opens in 1944 as the characters are killed in a rocket attack during Hitler’s “Vengeance Campaign” against Great Britain. After conjuring this tragedy, the narrator draws on Zeno’s paradox to theorize that for every historical event that’s occurred, there is an event that might have occurred. Thus, the reader comes to know sisters Jo and Val—the former, a brilliant and soulful rock star living in California; the latter, a woman trapped in a relationship with a violent, racist skinhead in England. As a London businessman, Vern sees peaks and valleys, as does Alec, a once-typesetter at the Times who in the ’70s finds his calling as a teacher. Ben is a schizophrenic whose heart-wrenching breakdown in 1979 London comprises the novel’s most stunning chapter. These narrative threads sometimes overlap, as when an adult Vern, bullied by Alec as a child, inadvertently knocks on Alec’s door while pursuing a property scheme. Watching the roles of bully and victim get reversed as the two of them catch up over tea is both tense and satisfying. Thanks to Spufford’s narrative wizardry, all five protagonists come to vivid life in this spectacularly moving story. Agent: Clare Alexander, Aitken Alexander Assoc.
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May 1, 2021
This richly imagined mosaic tracks the lives five Londoners might have experienced if they hadn't been killed as children by a V-2 rocket during World War II. It starts with a bang in an almost poetic description of the German weapon's inner workings and the utter havoc it wreaks. Spufford notes in a postscript the historical source of his opening scene: the 1944 bombing of a London Woolworths that killed 168, including 15 children. As god-novelist, he undoes death and gives five young victims an escape clause, "some other version of the reel of time, where might-be and could-be and would-be still may be." It's a device that might recall Kate Atkinson's Life After Life but with only one-time reincarnations. After we get a school-days view of the quintet in 1949, they are shown in their separate adult lives--with occasional intersections--every 15 years through 2009. Jo has a moment of pop stardom, Alec endures the union struggles on Fleet Street, Val finds love and darkness with a skinhead, Vern plays con man and real estate mogul, and Ben teeters on the edge of mental collapse. The precis doesn't do it justice. While the view is fragmentary and full of gaps, the characters are complex, engaging, memorable. Spufford does indeed bring them to life. He also brings depth and detail to every vignette, from a boy's view of soccer to hot-lead typesetting, a neo-Nazi concert, or a trip on a double-decker bus. There's a subtle theme on the war's legacy woven from references to building and rebuilding. The bigger threads are people and family, change and time, how we hurt, love, and use each other and find or lose ourselves while our brief lives evolve in "a messy spiral of hours and years." Entertaining and unconventional.COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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May 15, 2021
Five children die in 1944, but imagined glimpses of their unlived lives generate powerful moments of reflection and redemption. A German V-2 rocket obliterates a London department store, instantly killing young Alec and Ben, sisters Jo and Val, and pudgy little Vern with his finger up his nose. "Come, other future," pleads our narrator. And so we witness Alec attain and lose his job as a newspaper typesetter. Jo's musical aspirations fizzle into teaching and self-doubt, while Val becomes an accessory to violence. Ben struggles with mental illness, and Vern ventures unscrupulously into real-estate development. Meanwhile, the fictitious South London borough of Bexford gentrifies around them. By 2009, members of the group will have weathered divorce, bankruptcy, and prison, but they will have also known the joys of grandchildren, late-life romance, and forgiveness. Their lives are full, dynamic, and ordinary, their twists and turns tied to the turbulence of the late twentieth century. What is extraordinary, the author implies, may be the fragile miracle of life in the first place. Spufford's second novel swells with the same lively, intimate prose as his celebrated debut, The Golden Hill (2017). But its unconventional framing and larger, more contemporary themes makes it an even stronger book.COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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From the critically acclaimed and award‑winning author of Golden Hill, an "extraordinary...symphonic...casually stunning" (The Wall Street Journal) novel tracing the infinite possibilities of five lives in the bustling neighborhoods of 20th-century London.
Lunchtime on a Saturday, 1944: the Woolworths on Bexford High Street in South London receives a delivery of aluminum saucepans. A crowd gathers to see the first new metal in ages—after all, everything's been melted down for the war effort. An instant later, the crowd is gone; incinerated. Among the shoppers were five young children.
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