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LONGLISTED - MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2021
From the best-selling, prize-winning author of Golden Hill, a novel of five everyday lives - their dramas, their redemptions, their commonplace miracles - in the teeming, ever-changing immensity of 20th century London.
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.
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.
Author: Francis Spufford
Paperback Published March 2021 336 pages
'Radiant with hope and grace and courage...I loved it.' - Sarah Perry