Light Perpetual

A Novel

By: Francis Spufford

Narrated by: Imogen Church

Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, NPR, Slate, Lit Hub, Fresh Air, and more

A New York Times Notable Book

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 20th-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.

©2021 Francis Spufford. Originally published in Great Britain in 2021 by Faber & Faber Limited. All rights reserved. (P)2021 W.F. Howes. All rights reserved.

Transcendently written and brilliantly performed.

This is one of those novels that manages to contain the world. Come for the sumptuous sentences; stay for the beautiful exploration of redemption.

Rich with detail and deeper meaning

Wonderful. Beautifully written and perfectly performed. The opening scene is tremendous and the rest does not disappoint.

deep and beautiful

At the beginning, I had trouble concentrating on the lives described, in their stunning intricacy, as I continued remembering...they died; these lives never happened. Finally, I was able to give in to the ineluctible weave of this master storyteller's tale.
This is a remarkable achievement and a memorable reading experience. Thank you, Frances Spofford.
Brilliant.

Brilliant narration

Such a magnificent ode to hope, full of futures, pasts spawned by and ending in dust. Never read anything comparable.

A great novel

the voice performance was excellent, and the story was very well written. A really fascinating perspective on the journey through life.

Outstanding... breathtaking

This is such exemplary, transporting work, as a story and series of stories, and in performance. Of the hundreds of books I’ve read & heard in the past several years, this clearly stands out.

The vast array of voices and moods performed by Imogen Church is unsurpassable - I’ve never heard a better narration.

Prose poetry

The language was beautiful and evocative. Poetic and powerful. The characters and their lives were well drawn. The main premise and promise of the novel, however, imagining the lives that might have been of children killed in a London bombing, felt unfulfilled to me. There was no tie to the beginning at the end of the book. The story was left dangling.

Superlatives only

I can’t say enough good things about this miraculous book. It is a masterpiece. The narrator of this recording is probably the best I’ve ever heard, too. Thank you for a transcendent experience.

Lovely Listen

Light Perpetual was a little hard to get into. The opening chapter, with its technical description of a V-2 rocket explosion, was a little hard to follow. But the stories of the characters were developed with such care and compassion that I was more and more committed to them.

This novel has a meditative quality that may not be right for every reader, but I loved it. The narrator does a marvelous job with different voices and accents.

Wonderful reader

The reader is wonderful. She breathed a spirit into the book that I think would have been missing from the printed word. On the other hand, it might have been easier to keep track on the characters and the jumps in time in a print edition.