Announcing Light Perpetual, a new novel from Francis Spufford

Faber to publish an ingenious and profound new novel by Francis Spufford, the best-selling, prize-winning author of Golden Hill.

From the winner of the Costa First Novel Award, the RSL Ondaatje Prize and the Desmond Elliott Prize comes a novel of the everyday, the miraculous and the everlasting.

November 1944. A German rocket incinerates a South London household-goods store, and five young lives are atomised in an instant.

Jo and Valerie and Alec and Ben and Vernon are gone.

But what if it were possible to resurrect them – to let them experience the extraordinary, unimaginable changes of the twentieth century; to live out all the personal triumphs and disasters, the second chances and redemptions denied them?

What kind of future would there be for clever, impulsive Alec?
What would happen to Val in the world of men, beckoning beyond her all-female household?
What would become of Vern’s greed – and his helplessness in the face of song?
Would light or darkness fill Ben’s fragile mind?
And where would Jo go, with the music playing in her head?

Alex Bowler, Faber Publisher, says: ‘Like everything Francis has written, Light Perpetual is ingenious and profound, both sweeping and intimate, full of warmth and beauty. It has you turning the final page with a renewed and enriched appreciation for the gift of life’.

Francis Spufford is the author of five highly-praised works of non-fiction, most frequently described by reviewers as either ‘bizarre’ or ‘brilliant’, and usually as both. His debut novel Golden Hill won the Costa First Novel Award, the RSL Ondaatje Prize, the Desmond Elliott Prize, and was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, the Rathbones Folio Prize, the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award and the British Book Awards Debut Novel of the Year. In 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He teaches writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and lives near Cambridge.

Light Perpetual will be published on 4 February 2021. UK, Commonwealth (ex. Can) & EU rights were acquired from Clare Alexander at Aitken Alexander Associates.