Light Perpetual
Francis Spufford

Light Perpetual
Francis Spufford
Review
by Joanna Di Mattia
It starts with a bang. November 1944. A Saturday lunchtime on the Bexford high street, a fictional South London neighbourhood. There’s a buzz at Woolworths, the kind explained by wartime rationing: a gleaming delivery of saucepans, the first in years. Five working-class kids – sisters Jo and Val, Alec, Ben, and Vernon – are with their mums. There’s a buzz overhead too, as a German V-2 rocket heads their way. It strikes, flattening the scene. All those lives extinguished, just like that.
That’s the vivid scene that opens Francis Spufford’s elegant new novel Light Perpetual. It draws on real events: a German rocket did decimate a South London Woolworths in 1944 and killed 168 people, including 15 children under the age of 11. Spufford has passed the plaque that commemorates this loss every day for over a decade, and it planted a seed. Jo, Val, Alec, Ben and Vernon aren’t real, but they could be any of the children who died that day. Stretching out from this prologue, Spufford imagines an alternative history of the five lives that might have been lived, brightly lit.
Checking in with his quintet at 15-year intervals from 1949 to 2009, Spufford’s style is warm and intimate. Via a montage of episodes, he spends a day at a time with each character as they grow older and mostly wiser; we fill in the gaps, as time moves forward, both slowly and with speed.
Light Perpetual is interested in the imperfect fragments that comprise a day and ultimately a whole life. Spufford notices and observes; his great strength is how he renders the minutiae of everyday life – the highs, the disappointments, the washing up. Light Perpetual is a quiet, beautiful, and profound novel. It is a reminder that in all human calamities, we are more than just anonymous bodies in a crowd.
Joanna Di Mattia is a bookseller at Readings Carlton.
This item is in-stock and will ship in 2-3 business days
Sign in or become a Readings Member to add this title to a wishlist.

The Final Revival of Opal & Nev
$32.99Buy now
Finding stock availability...

How Do You Live?
$29.99Buy now
Finding stock availability...

On the Line: Notes from a Factory
$27.99Buy now
Finding stock availability...

First Person Singular
$34.99Buy now
Finding stock availability...

Another Life
$32.99Buy now
Finding stock availability...

How Beautiful We Were
$29.99Buy now
Finding stock availability...

A Million Things
$32.99Buy now
Finding stock availability...

Hot Stew
$32.99Buy now
Finding stock availability...

The Final Revival of Opal & Nev
$32.99Buy now
Finding stock availability...

Lonely Castle in the Mirror
$32.99Buy now
Finding stock availability...

With the Falling of the Dusk
$34.99Buy now
Finding stock availability...

Tussaud
$32.99Buy now
Finding stock availability...

First Person Singular
$34.99Buy now
Finding stock availability...

Helgoland
$39.99Buy now
Finding stock availability...

How Beautiful We Were
$29.99Buy now
Finding stock availability...

The Hard Crowd
$32.99Buy now
Finding stock availability...