Excerpt from Nonesuch by Francis Spufford, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

PROLOGUE

The time to do it, if she was going to try something so mad at all, was in the gap between the closing of the office and the first checking of the blackout. Mr. Seaton, the air raid warden for the Mariner Building, worked in the insurance office on the second floor, and when he put on his tin hat at the end of the day and turned into the voice of authority, he liked to start from the ground and work upwards.

There ought to be a few minutes before he got up to the ninth floor. He was somewhere down by the feet of the immense statue of the sea-king that rose from bottom to top of the facade; she was up by its chin.

The other girls were putting on coats and hats and mufflers and leaving one by one. She had already gone through the whole routine of shutting down the teleprinter, but when Mr. Cornellis put his head around the door to turn off the light, she ducked down onto the floor behind the desk and pretended to be busy in the supply drawer.

"I'm just changing the ribbon for tomorrow, sir," she said.

"I thought you'd delegated all the purely clerical stuff," he said.

"It's a temperamental beast. Sonia hasn't quite got the knack yet."

"Oh, very well, very well," he said. "Lights off quickly, though, please, when you're done."

"You can do it now, sir. I can see in the light from the window."

"All right then. Safe home, everybody." He tipped his hat, flipped the switch, and took his anxious frown away, footsteps receding down the parquet corridor of Cornellis & Blome, brokers. Ordinarily, he would have waited to be the last out, and to lock the door of his kingdom behind him, but the keys were now surrendered to Seaton downstairs, to do his rounds, and to let in the firemen if the worst came to the worst and a German incendiary came spitting and flaring down among the filing cabinets. In the twilight, the others shuffled out fast. Only Sonia lingered at the door, just sixteen, on her first job and inclined to cling.

"You doing anything tonight, Iris?" she said hopefully. "You seeing your feller?"

"I should be so lucky. Another night in the Anderson, I expect, reading Playford on Securities."

"D'you want to get the Tube together, then?"

"Sorry, I need to hang on here while I sort this out. It's been playing up all day. You go on. Good night!"

Finally, she went. Iris gave it a few seconds and then shut the door after her. She listened, but the sounds were dwindling ones, retreating ones.

The office was all gray outlines and blue voids, in the last of the daylight. Outside, the blue haze of coal smoke that always hung over the City was dimming, and seeming as it did so to be coagulating back onto the bulk of the buildings, turning them too hazy and indistinct, heavy masses with uncertain edges. The little piece of the river she could see was gunmetal-gray, light-absorbent; the dome of St. Paul's looked as if it had been cut out of purple paper. By now, there should have been a cheerful glitter of electricity and neon brightening it all, the money that had been made during the day in the veil of smoke shining back out of it in spendthrift promises of food, laughter, pleasure. Instead there was this stillness, this dim abandoned hush, as if the tiny figures departing down there in the gloom were not just getting out of reach of tonight's probable raid—six nights out of the last seven, the bombers had come—but were deserting the Square Mile altogether, fleeing it for good. Or as if this had never been a greedy, wily, striving, noisy, contentious, elbows-out, nonstop temple to human appetites, but had come into being in some silent submarine process. A dark reef, secreted in its marble and brick with no reference to human beings.

She opened the steel-framed window beside her desk. A cold breath of autumn blew in, dusty, riverine, but with a burnt edge from the buildings ruined in last night's raid, and the one before's. She sat down, feeling ridiculous. The words she had insisted Geoffrey write down were on a twist of paper in her bag. She smoothed it out. His precise draftsman's lettering was still legible in the gloom. She cleared her throat. If you must do this, she heard him saying irritably in her head, you better speak it out good and clear. It's all in the harmonics, remember. You're setting a hook in the air.

Excerpted from Nonesuch by Francis Spufford. Copyright © 2026 by Francis Spufford. Excerpted by permission of Scribner. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.