In 1944, a bomb dropped on Woolworths in South East London killing customers including children.
Spufford imagines lives for these children and - like the ITV programme Seven Up - revisits them every ten years.
It’s an intriguing premise and beautifully written. Their stories aren’t linked but they capture the ages they live through and the way that life waxes and wanes and fortunes change.
I would say that although Spufford’s writing is so assured, I never really felt drawn in by the characters or really engaged on an emotional level. I enjoyed the read but never felt compelled to know their fates.
There was something a little detached about the writing.
However I would recommend this novel as an evocative and poetic series of stories of times gone by.

This book follows five characters over the course of their lives from the end of the second world war up until the recent past. The book skips forwards 15 years in each section and describes a single day in the life of each character at each point in time. These five characters all died during a rocket attack towards the end of the second world war but we discover in the very first chapter that this is an alternate universe where the bomb didn't hit and where we get to discover how their lives would have played out.

The novel is set in the fictional London suburb of Bexford and the descriptions of London life are particularly good. Music plays a big part (one of the characters has synaesthesia) and I thought this worked really well - the descriptions of the music and the character's responses to music were very striking. Initially the book feels like a collection of disconnected short stories but as the plot progresses we start to spot connections between the different threads and the endings of each tale are poignant especially given the first chapter.

I thought this was great and will read his other novel.

I have never read this author before and the blurb for this novel intrigued me. In the author notes, he tells us that he walked by a plaque everyday commemorating a V-2 attack in 1944 when the Woolworths branch in New Cross was destroyed. Among the dead were fifteen under elevens. This novel is written in memory of these children and we meet five fictional children, Val, Jo, Alec, Ben and Vern. We witness their deaths and we witness their lives -if they had had a chance to survive.

We follow these children from 1949 to 2009, dropping in every few years and watching them for a few hours to see what they are making of their lives. We go from post war, to 1979 and strikes, to the deregulation of schools and Ofsteds. We encounter racism, mental illness, violence and love. We see life in all it size, shapes and colours.

Religion is a thread that runs through the novel - 'light perpetual shines upon them' is from, I think, a prayer for the dead. The positivity of religion, the healing power of religion shines through at the end - the 'praise him' section towards the end of the novel is incredibly lifting.

Music is also a thread that follows the characters - from opera to a secondary school music lesson - and this whole section about the way that the pupils are encouraged to build their sound is just exceptional writing.

The writing in this novel is beautiful, and varied, and no two chapters are written in the same way. The opening chapter when the bomb hits is excruciating in its detail, you are watching everything unfold in slow motion and the aftermath is heart-breaking. I don't want to give any spoilers but when we encounter violence, the language is brutal while the final chapter is lyrical and uplifting.

Many will disagree with me, but I believe that every reader will take something different from a novel. For me - and this is my opinion - I felt that this was almost a novel of second chances. As I read and watched these children grow older and make their choices, I would return to the beginning and look at the children they were. Were they making the most of their second chances? Did they deserve their second chances? But as I said - this was my feeling.

However, the concept of giving these children a parallel life, or the bomb falling up the road and missing them, was an interesting one. I loved watching them grow and my favourite child - it would have to be Ben, with Jo my second favourite. But as all parents know - you should never really have a favourite child, should you?

This was a super and up-lifting read and I thoroughly recommend it.

Five children are killed after a German bomb hits Woolworths on the day of a big saucepan delivery. Spufford imagines a different outcome, a parallel world where the children survive to live through the 20th century. But this is no Sliding Doors. The characters go on to live real lives with ups and downs.

The premise really lured me in. However, the book felt slightly disjointed. Other than the conceit at the beginning, there was little to link the characters as each chapter focused on a different point in one of the different characters’ lives.

That said, I think fans of books set in the post-war London suburbs might still enjoy this, as it did capture the atmosphere.

Light Perpetual by Frances Spufford
Having read Golden Hill by this author I was very much looking forward to reading his new novel and I was not disappointed. It is a very different novel but gripped me from the powerful opening description of the destruction of Woolworths in 1944. It is reminiscent in theme to Life After Life by Kate Atkinson but provides an interesting commentary on these lost futures of these children who were atomised by the blast which destroyed Woolworths.
The story which follows imagines the lost lives of five children who died as their parents queued to try and buy aluminium saucepans which had appeared on the shelves of Woolworths. We meet them first as children in a music lesson. Alec, the impulsive smart child, who succeeds in annoying the headteacher by pretending to be enraptured by what he is telling him. Vern, the child with a terrible singing voice, who loves music. Jo, who loves to sing, and sits at the front in the music lesson to make the most of the opportunity and her twin Val who is more interested in boys. Then there is quiet, fragile Ben, frightened and confused by the noise at the Milwall game.
What are the futures of which they have been deprived? Frances Spufford follows their lives as they assume the roles of sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts and finally grandparents. We see the changes of the century through their everyday dramas. We witness decades of social and technological revolution. Our children become bus conductors, print setters, swindlers, teachers, patients and inmates. We see those who believe they are irretrievably lost find redemption.
This is a fascinating depiction of some of the events of the last century which had faded from my memory. The horrors of the National Front and the thuggery of the skinheads, the corrupt practices of Fleet Street, the lack of support for those suffering from mental illness and the terrible treatment of women. All were portrayed powerfully. There was also a celebration of how wonderfully multi-cultural London has become.
This is a powerful novel celebrating life in all its forms and one which I will be thoroughly recommending to my book groups. I would like to thank the author, Faber and Faber Ltd and Net Galley for the opportunity to read this novel in return for an honest review.

The synopsis of the book sounded really interesting but I did not really feel that it was as good as it promised. apart from Vernon who was portrayed as unlikeable from a family of black marketeers and continuing the tradition by get-rich-quick schemes that were doomed to failure, I did not think that any of the characters were developed enough. By contrast, the background is long-winded and over-embellished. Sorry just not my cup of tea.

The premise for this book sounded wonderfully heartbreaking and enticing at the same time, a dream combination, but unfortunately the story just didn’t grip me.

In 1944 London, a bomb drops on a Woolworth’s store and kills five children. This book is the story of the five children’s’ lost lives, had they not been lost.

It is beautifully written, even from the very first page you can tell it’s going to be poetic and almost painfully descriptive. I’ve never heard an explosion be described in such fantastic detail. But I’m glad I knew the premise, because it would have taken me a while to work out what was happening otherwise.

The period and setting are described so well throughout, but I struggled to feel any kind of deep connection with the characters and I had to really force myself to pick up the book at times.

Still, perhaps the lives of these children will grip your heart far more than they gripped mine. The writing is truly beautiful.

Thank you to Faber and Faber Ltd. for the arc. Light Perpetual will be out on February 4th, 2021.

In 1944, a V-2 devastates a south London high street, an incident Spufford renders in pin-sharp bullet time, horrifying even as it's abstracted: "Matter has its smallest, finite subdivisions. Time does not. One ten-thousandth of a second is a fat volume of time, with onion-skin pages uncountable"*. In that tiny instant, almost everyone in the vicinity is blown apart, sundered, scattered, irreversibly. Except – Spufford then shows us the future which might have been, how those lost lives could have threaded through the next 65 years, with all their ups and downs. For the most part, the novel from that point on is pretty much a portrait of everyday life – not something of which I'm normally much enamoured in fiction. But here, as in Red Plenty and Golden Hill, Spufford has a gift for catching the particularity and strangeness both of the past and of the timeless in elegant prose – sometimes, in keeping with his title, it's outright luminous. When he describes a sixties bank holiday in Margate, or an old-style printworks, what can often come across elsewhere as the litfic equivalent of a hack comedian doing Choppers and Spangles instead sings. And when he's not tugging expertly at the heartstrings with nostalgia, he can capture the everyday like this, on the way long-term lovers almost don't notice the alterations to each other: "The changes are too gradual. Or, more than that, the changes are additions not displacements, only ever doing their work on top of memory, in all its layers and layers. The girl doesn't go away, she just gets added to. Maybe it goes on like that, he thinks. Maybe that's what's happening, he thinks, when you come across one of those pensioner couples down the pub who are all handsy with each other." There's also a passage which is the closest I think I've ever come to understanding how someone could write a song.

This conjuror's gift is strong enough that it even lets me overcome my usual resistance to having writers invent whole London districts – although it helps that Bexford, aside from the slight overreach of its borough status, seems like exactly the sort of South London neighbourhood you don't know is there until you move next door to it. Granted, he lets his otherwise meticulous research down by having the 29 bus go there, when never in all its history has it gone south of the river, and even if it did it probably wouldn't end up in that neck of the woods. But notwithstanding that small sin, Spufford understands London. As one of the protagonists clicks, in childhood: "The Thames is an ugly big river, ugly and and loud, not pretty, and the song is saying that being big and loud and ugly makes London exciting, and that being exciting is better than being pretty." Again, much later in life, one of them looks out from on high over the whole glorious, impossible expanse of the place and is still blown away by it, "how big it is, how unappeasably, inexhaustibly much there is of it". Another character, taking the Tube, has one of those moments when you're suddenly overwhelmed by an apprehension of all the faces around you, when the crowd suddenly resolves into hundreds of individuals, each the centre of their own world, and you're overwhelmed to really realise how much life London holds. All these passages, inevitably, reading very differently now the place is at best on indefinite hold, at worst over; you probably shouldn't be on the Tube anymore at all, and if you are, you should see no faces. That sense of the city always changing, perhaps one day ruined, and how you can never stop and call it back to a previous iteration, is a big part of the whole paradoxical project – but all the same, and for all that the acknowledgments confirm the book was at least finalised post-Event, one wonders whether Spufford had in mind quite how drastically and how soon the place would be remade. Inevitably, Light Perpetual feels to some extent like an unwitting sequel to the other South London novel I read recently, The Dreaming Suburb – each following residents of a particular area over the decades, one leading into the War and the other out of it. And like that book, there's an unwelcome reminder of how sometimes whole professions simply cease to be a thing: cinema pianists in the inter-war years; compositors after technological advances and the piss-taking of the print unions in the seventies; and now, bartenders and DJs? Even pre-Event, there would have been moments which made me feel terribly old, as when the tatty Victoria bus station of 1979 is far closer to my noughties memories than the place I passed through in 2019. And when one former Londoner, relocated to the US, describes seventies London as "grim, grim, grim. Dirty and miserable and kind of, you know, defeated-feeling?", one can only think, ha, at least you could get a pint then.

So after all of that, what does the apocalyptic opening ultimately contribute? A memorial, for one thing, to the real incident in New Cross which inspired the book, the potential extinguished then. A sense of life, even its most mundane details, as contingent – again something which has been brought home this past year. A meta nod, because it wouldn't be Spufford's first of those, to the demiurgic power of the writer, able to slay dozens and then wind the clock back more easily than Superman and let them live again. But more than any of those, a sort of hymn to life in all its possibilities, the good and the bad of it unfurling forever and, even as things are lost, somehow remembered in eternity just as here it's captured on the page. An attempt at deriving a cosmic grandeur and a meaning from the fact that lives happen at all, not unlike a vastly more manageable and less baggy cousin to Alan Moore's Jerusalem. Read at another time, even what we laughingly thought then were bad ones, the sense of the moments of beauty justifying the pain would have transported me. Even now, parts of it brought a tear to my eye with the sheer beauty they found in the everyday connected over the years, the wonderful things birthed from the foam of life. But in this endless, empty present, it was hard not to come back to the part where one of the initial, unknowing survivors, many years later, worries for his granddaughter and is told that even in the best case where she really does get over it, and has the rest of her life ahead of her, "you know what? There'll be something else, and something else again, and we won't be able to wave a wand over those things either. Problem after problem after problem, going on forever. It never stops." Which rather makes one wonder if all Spufford did by sparing these lives was to store up more suffering for them, and for the future generations they birthed, and to wonder if Larkin didn't have the kinder idea after all: "Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, and don't have any kids yourself."

*Although I could have sworn I saw a while back that there might be an equivalent to the Planck length for time, a smallest subdivision of the second. Still, let it pass.

(Netgalley ARC)

A quiet, compassionate novel surveying the latter half of the twentieth century through the lives of five children who either were or weren’t killed during the Blitz. I had to constantly remind myself that this was an alternative history and that the stories I was reading were fiction within fiction - all five characters have hugely diverse experiences but all feel fully realised as people and they are given depth and rich inner lives by Spufford. I loved the small moments when their lives intertwined and I found myself cheering on even those I wouldn’t support in life. This is a beautifully written text with sentences I lingered over and returned to. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC, highly recommended.

The stimulus for writing this came from passing an area damaged by a V2 bomb in Ww2. The author has chosen to depict the lives that 5 children who perished then might have had had they lived. Taken at 10 year intervals the reader is led through the highs and lows of their lives. It gives a good social history of the times visited with well fleshed out characters

I loved the start of this book, the descriptions of time and of the bomb going off left me expecting an amazing book. But unfortunately that isn't how I felt when I was reading what followed. It seems to be a strange concept for a book - writing about a group of people at various stages in their lives with no real indications of what had happened in the meantime. It felt to me as though the author had some good ideas for characters but not enough to really write about their whole lives. And I didn't really care about any of them once that bomb had gone off. Too me is seems like it is a series of vignettes, not a novel. I am grateful to Netgalley and the publishers for the opportunity to read and review an e-ARC of this title.

1944, a bomb drops on a Woolworth store in South London and five children's lives are lost. How would those lives have been lived? This novel gives a narrative to the children. It follows them through the years as they make their way in the world, finding happiness, sadness, fear and acceptance.
This is a gentle, beautifully written novel, full.of poetic insight. As the years draw to an end for the re-imagined lives of the five individuals, there is a sadness and poignancy at the transient and fragile nature of a lifetime.
Very thought-provoking.

If I hadn't read the book description I would have been totally lost after the first chapter!

It is beautifully written but I didn't feel engaged with the characters and their stories just didn't grip me.

The idea is fine - five children killed in a bombing, what would their lives have looked like if they had lived?

However if you forget the first chapter, the book documents five lives, and not terribly exciting lives. Perhaps the idea works better with more powerful characters; what if JFK had lived, what if the Obama's never met? As they weren't real children I can't feel that it was a tragedy that they died, I appreciate that real children did die but I could not get emotionally involved. I was hoping that the five stories would tie up in the end - but no, they rambled on their individual paths. In some cases the rambling was more pronounced than others, there were pages of nonsensical or repetitive prose, perhaps I am a literary heathen and do not appreciate the finer things but I found myself skim reading these parts.

Came away thinking - "What would have happened if I didn't read the book?"

This was a totally engrossing read. Five children who died in a bomb attack during the war are brought back to life and their potential lives are examined in snapshots at various dates; 1949, 1964, 1979, 1994, 2009, imagining what may have happened to them. The stories are rich in descriptive detail which I would normally skim, but the author has a unique way of writing which holds the interest. He writes about music, printing, teaching, mental illness with equal expertise. He captures each decade accurately. (I had forgotten how intimidating skinheads were.) You get into the heads of the five main characters as they go where life takes them, seizing or losing opportunities, being happy, sad, content or miserable, basically as we all live our lives. This is a book I will read again, and I rarely want to do that. I might even buy it!

The initial overview of this book sparked my interest and the first date period during 1944 and the V2 attack on Woolworths (while a fact) was personalized by describing the 5 children who lost their lives in detail. However, the subsequent time periods and the lives of these children – had they lived – failed to keep my initial interest and the more complex their lives became, resulted in 5 different threads that became more difficult to follow. For me, the structure of the stories of their lives created a somewhat disjointed read and eventually I stopped reading the book, a rare event for me.

A beautifully written insight of ordinary lives through the years. The first chapter is written almost like a science lesson, but do not let this put you off. What follows is an easy to read, yet rich in detail, look at five lives at different stages of time ( 1944, 1949, 1964, 1979, 1994, 2009). It is rare that an author accomplishes a book that will engage with such a wide range of readers. Everyone will find something within its pages that they feel is relatable and that is the simple joy of this book. A thought-provoking and grounded read, it will be so easy to recommend as it's simply fantastic.

Thank you to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this superb book.

This is the first title I have read by Francis Spufford and I am grateful to NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to acquaint myself with his work.

I really did not like the first few pages which felt overworked and pretentious. Thinking that the book was going to be an uphill struggle, I was pleased that it settled down very quickly into an immensely readable style. Any doubts I had about jumping several years forward in each chapter were dispelled as I found that it really did not matter that what had happened in the intervening time was not revealed in more than the sketchiest detail. On the contrary, it was fascinating to meet the different characters repeatedly at different stages in their lives.

What I loved most about this author's writing is his descriptive passages. They were many and varied but the one I loved the best was the workings of the printing press. And my blood ran cold when reading about the skinheads, in particular the sickening racist attack.

This is powerful writing by an author whose work I need to explore further..

A fascinating read based around a poignant concept. Spufford takes a 1944 bombing of Woolworths as a starting point, then imagines the ongoing potential lives of the children that were killed in the bombing.

Although this starting point launches the novel, once it's underway that becomes less prominent and less relevant to the lives we are shown, the more fascinating aspect is how the children might have experienced different aspects of life in the UK from the post-war years though to present-day.

Given the differences in the children's development we get to see so many different sections of society and attitudes and the novel gives a real feel for post-Ware Britain, in beautifully described prose and instant scene-setting that is easy to follow and a pleasure to read.

I could have carried on reading long after the ending, loved it.

Light Perpetual is an intriguing novel: not quite what it at first appears.

The opening premise of a 1944 bombing is pretty irrelevant - and if you go into this expecting a Kate Atkinsoneque Life After Life, you will be disappointed. However, once Spufford throws off this literary conceit, what follows is an astute and sensitive novel, a collection of engaging snapshot biographies.

Despite the disjointed form, the characters are richly imagined. They are complex - certainly not always likeable, but sensitive and real. Through their eyes, we catch snippets of London history, following shifts in attitude and culture, so that the city almost becomes a character in itself.

Light Perpetual is perhaps not quite what I expected - but it is well worth a read as a sketch of London life through the years, and for its vivid, compassionate exploration of character.