BookBrowse Reviews Nonesuch by Francis Spufford

BookBrowse:

Rendering World War II-era London in vibrant detail before spiking it with the fantastical, Nonesuch is another richly textured alt-history adventure from Francis Spufford.

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Iris Hawkins is a financial secretary in London with quite enough to worry about. The Nazis have just invaded Poland, and the bustling city is subsumed with blackouts, air raid sirens, and the sense that things are about to get much worse. But after a hookup with a young man named Geoff (who works in the nascent medium of television), she's pursued by a monstrous figure made of old newspaper. From there, Iris is drawn into the world of the occult, where she must stop a fascist plot to rewrite history.

Francis Spufford has made these vivid, compulsively readable adventures in another world his stock-in-trade: Golden Hill's vision of 18th-century New York teems with life, while Cahokia Jazz stages a crackerjack noir narrative in an alternate universe where a thriving Native American metropolis sits on the bank of the Mississippi. But until now, he's never dabbled in the fantastical. He does a creditable job here, with uncanny newspaper golems that move like a liquid "denser and heavier than mercury," blue angels with a voice like "many wineglasses being rung together," and Iris's newfound ability to read people's emotions by touching them with her right hand.

But Nonesuch also concerns itself—maybe even primarily concerns itself—with the minutiae of living in this very interesting place at this very interesting time. Iris's journeys on the London Underground are lovingly plotted from station to station; her work at a stock brokerage is complicated by a barrage of wartime regulations; she navigates the realities of rationing, first only butter and sugar before the rest of the ration book's pages get filled out. At times, the pacing suffers as a result (the book is almost 500 pages, and feels a good hundred pages longer), but it's a pleasure to explore a bygone London—a more innocent London, one which hadn't yet been marred by German bombs.

Until, of course, the Blitz comes, and Spufford shows all sides of it: not just the famous "stiff upper lip" that bore Britain through the attacks, nor the comforts and generosity extended by volunteers and shelter offered by wealthy friends in the countryside, but the habitual stress-smoking, the exhausted shuffling through routines between raids, the raw nerves. "The insouciant stuff, the London-can-take-it stuff, [was] flattened into bad temper by thirty-plus nights of continuous raids and counting." One might draw comparisons to another crisis, perhaps one which began six years ago, which has shown the good and the bad of us in equal measure.

One might draw comparisons to a lot of things, actually. A coterie of political malcontents who appear to be an ignorable fringe until they suddenly aren't; a woman who devotes herself to fascism despite being a closeted lesbian; the odd sense of unreality that comes when observing a gradually encroaching danger before it ends up on your doorstep. Spufford, thankfully, doesn't draw obvious parallels to current events—he has enough faith in the reader to know they'll make their own connections, and enough faith in his storytelling to know they'll care enough to apply themselves.

Nonesuch is not a standalone novel; its sequel, Arcady, arrives next year. I'm telling you this now because if you, like me, went into this assuming it would have a complete story, you might be frustrated to discover the cliffhanger ending. But now that you know, you will hopefully read Nonesuch as it ought to be read: with steadily growing anticipation for more.

This review first ran in the April 8, 2026 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.