May 20

May 20 Light Perpetual

Author: Francis Spufford
Publisher: Scribner
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

From the critically acclaimed and award‑winning author of Golden Hill, a mesmerizing and boldly inventive 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 southeast 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 lets an alternative reel of time run, imagining the life arcs 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, disasters; of second chances and redemption.

Ingenious and profound, full of warmth and beauty, Light Perpetual illuminates the shapes of experience, the extraordinariness of the ordinary, the mysteries of memory and expectation, and the preciousness of life.

TL;DR Review

While this book wasn’t for everyone, I found it to be moving and thought-provoking. Also, the audiobook is incredibly performed and I highly recommend it.

For you if: You like character-driven novels that take place over the span of a lifetime.

Full Review

I read Light Perpetual because it was longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize, with my #BookerOfTheMonth book club. A lot of people who came to our discussion either didn’t care for it or felt neutral about it, but personally, I did quite like it.

The book starts with a sort of thought experiment: Take five young children killed by a bomb in London in 1944. What if they’d lived instead? What would their lives have looked like? We jump forward in time, dropping into their lives every 10–15 years from childhood to old age, getting a snapshot of what’s happening and has happened up to that point in time.

A lot of people at book club had a similar complaint (I don’t think this is really a spoiler, but if you hate knowing things going into a book, stop here): that the bomb, or the fact that none of them actually lives, doesn’t come into play again. The book doesn’t return to this fact at all — the no-bomb-alternative-timeline thing is truly just a thought experiment that launches these characters’ stories into motion. Readers had expected a kind of closure or meaning that never came, and it left them feeling like, what was the point? But personally, this didn’t bother me. I felt like the point was to show that all our lives have ups and downs, and they’re all different, but in that way, they’re also all the same; the alternating mundane and novel aspects of a human lifespan give us more in common than we think. Those who died, if they’d lived, would have found themselves on the same journey as the rest of us, with their own unique struggles and joys. Our lives are special, and also common, and it’s beautiful.

The last thing I’ll say about this one is that the audiobook was incredibly performed — more like a one-woman play performed than a novel narrated — and probably made the difference between me feeling neutral about this and loving it. I’ll be keeping an eye out for books Imogen Church reads in the future!