Light Perpetual: 'Heartbreaking . . . a boundlessly rich novel.' Telegraph

Description

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.

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.

'Francis Spufford has one of the most original minds in contemporary literature.' - Nick Hornby '[Spufford's] writing crackles with energy and glee.' - Robert Douglas-Fairhurst