1944. It's a Saturday lunchtime on Bexford High Street. The Woolworths has a new delivery of aluminum saucepans, and a crowd has gathered to see the first new metal in a long time. Everything else has been melted down for the war effort.

An instant later, the crowd is gone. Incinerated. Atomised.

Among that crowd were five little children. What future did they lose? The only way to know is 'to let run some other version of the reel of time, where might-be and could-be and would-be. still may be'.

Ingenious and profound, full of warmth and beauty, Light Perpetual is a story of the everyday, the miraculous and the everlasting - a sweeping and intimate celebration of the gift of life.

'Radiant with hope and grace and courage...I loved it.' - Sarah Perry

Details

ISBN13: 9780571368730
Format: Paperback / softback
Number of Pages: 336
Edition:
Publication Date: 02 Mar 2021
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Publication City, Country: London, United Kingdom
Dimensions (cm): 216(H)x135(L)338
Weight (gm): 338

Author Biography

Francis Spufford is the author of five highly-praised works of non-fiction, most frequently described by reviewers as either 'bizarre' or 'brilliant', and usually as both. His debut novel Golden Hill won the Costa First Novel Award, the RSL Ondaatje Prize, the Desmond Elliott Prize, and was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, the Rathbones Folio Prize, the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award and the British Book Awards Debut Novel of the Year. In 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He teaches writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and lives near Cambridge.

Reviews

'Francis Spufford has one of the most original minds in contemporary literature.' - Nick Hornby

'Dazzling ... [Spufford is] one of the finest prose stylists of his generation. If his stories grip, his sentences practically glow.' - Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, The Times

'Spufford is a tremendously varied and surprising writer ... but a warmth of style and nimble dance of intellect travel with him across subjects and genres...Light Perpetual is something new and brave. With exceptional care, with a loving shrewdness that's a little Hogarthian, Spufford catches the voices and hopes of five not-dead working-class south Londoners, and the people who change and shape them.' - Guardian Book of the Week

'A brilliant, attention-grabbing, capacious experiment with fiction.' - Observer

'Light Perpetual's brilliance lies in the emotion and drama it wrings from the ordinary - but profoundly meaningful - experiences of its protagonists. Spufford's prose, which is never showy, but always beautifully accurate, confers an extraordinary dignity on the lives of these imagined children, recovered from the rubble of a fictional bomb site.' - Financial Times

'Intelligent and moving ... [A] very enjoyable novel.' - Scotsman

'A remarkable work.' Amanda Craig