Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published May 2021
336 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
From the critically acclaimed and award‑winning author of Golden Hill, a mesmerizing and boldly inventive 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 southeast 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 lets an alternative reel of time run, imagining the life arcs 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, disasters; of second chances and redemption.
Ingenious and profound, full of warmth and beauty, Light Perpetual illuminates the shapes of experience, the extraordinariness of the ordinary, the mysteries of memory and expectation, and the preciousness of life.
"Spufford spins alternate narratives for five Londoners who died during the London Blitz in this magical yarn...stunning...Thanks to Spufford's narrative wizardry, all five protagonists come to vivid life in this spectacularly moving story." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"[T]he 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... Entertaining and unconventional." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"I was reminded of the death-defying bent of two other recent novels—Kate Atkinson's Life After Life and Paul Auster's 4 3 2 1 — both of which share with Light Perpetual a kind of radiant goodness, a sense that the world is a better place for having such books within them…Light Perpetual's brilliance lies in the emotion and drama it wrings from the ordinary—but profoundly meaningful—experiences of its protagonists." - Financial Times (UK)
"With bold metaphysical engineering, the Golden Hill author conjures miraculous everyday existence…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." - The Guardian (UK)
"Dazzling...[Spufford is] one of the finest prose stylists of his generation. If his stories grip, his sentences practically glow." - The Times (UK)
"A brilliant, attention-grabbing, capacious experiment with fiction." - The Observer (UK)
"Boundlessly rich." - The Telegraph (UK)
"Radiant with hope and grace and courage...I loved it." - Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent
This information about Light Perpetual was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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.
Author Interview
Link to Francis Spufford's Website
Name Pronunciation
Francis Spufford: SPUFF-ord (rhymes with stuff)
The Flower Sisters
by Michelle Collins Anderson
From the new Fannie Flagg of the Ozarks, a richly-woven story of family, forgiveness, and reinvention.
The House on Biscayne Bay
by Chanel Cleeton
As death stalks a gothic mansion in Miami, the lives of two women intertwine as the past and present collide.
The Funeral Cryer by Wenyan Lu
Debut novelist Wenyan Lu brings us this witty yet profound story about one woman's midlife reawakening in contemporary rural China.
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
