Light Perpetual
A Novel
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3.8 • 15 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, NPR, Slate, Lit Hub, Fresh Air, and more
From the critically acclaimed and award‑winning author of Golden Hill, an “extraordinary…symphonic…casually stunning” (The Wall Street Journal) novel tracing the infinite possibilities of five lives in the bustling neighborhoods of 20th-century London.
Lunchtime on a Saturday, 1944: the Woolworths on Bexford High Street in South London receives a delivery of aluminum saucepans. A crowd gathers to see the first new metal in ages—after all, everything’s been melted down for the war effort. An instant later, the crowd is gone; incinerated. Among the shoppers were five young children.
Who were they? What futures did they lose? This brilliantly constructed novel, inspired by real events, lets an alternative reel of time run, imagining the lives of these five souls as they live through the extraordinary, unimaginable changes of the bustling immensity of twentieth-century London. Their intimate everyday dramas, as sons and daughters, spouses, parents, grandparents; as the separated, the remarried, the bereaved. Through decades of social, sexual, and technological transformation, as bus conductors and landlords, as swindlers and teachers, patients and inmates. Days of personal triumphs and disasters; of second chances and redemption.
Ingenious and profound, full of warmth and beauty, Light Perpetual “offers a moving view of how people confront the gap between their expectations and their reality” (The New Yorker) and illuminates the shapes of experience, the extraordinariness of the ordinary, the mysteries of memory, and the preciousness of life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Spufford (Golden Hill) spins alternate narratives for five Londoners who died during the London Blitz in this magical yarn. The story opens in 1944 as the characters are killed in a rocket attack during Hitler's "Vengeance Campaign" against Great Britain. After conjuring this tragedy, the narrator draws on Zeno's paradox to theorize that for every historical event that's occurred, there is an event that might have occurred. Thus, the reader comes to know sisters Jo and Val—the former, a brilliant and soulful rock star living in California; the latter, a woman trapped in a relationship with a violent, racist skinhead in England. As a London businessman, Vern sees peaks and valleys, as does Alec, a once-typesetter at the Times who in the '70s finds his calling as a teacher. Ben is a schizophrenic whose heart-wrenching breakdown in 1979 London comprises the novel's most stunning chapter. These narrative threads sometimes overlap, as when an adult Vern, bullied by Alec as a child, inadvertently knocks on Alec's door while pursuing a property scheme. Watching the roles of bully and victim get reversed as the two of them catch up over tea is both tense and satisfying. Thanks to Spufford's narrative wizardry, all five protagonists come to vivid life in this spectacularly moving story.
