Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford

This was long listed for the Booker Prize in 2021, and I have a long standing tradition of reading some if not all the books on the list. This book is characteristic of many that are nominated, in that it has an odd twist on how to tell a story. The idea came to the author as he was walking down London’s New Cross Road past a branch of Iceland on the site of which, in November 1944, a German V2 rocket fell. A plaque commemorates the killing of 168 people, including several children, in what was then Woolworths. Thinking about the lives cut short, he decided to make his novel about five working-class children, allowing them to survive and grow up but not using their actual names and transposing their stories to the invented south London borough of Bexford. The novel opens with a poised, detailed and audacious description of the bomb itself exploding and then follows his five characters for a day each in 1949, 1964, 1979, 1994 and 2009. The book leaps through their lives, giving us jsut a glimpse of how it all came out. There is a lot said and a lot left to the imagination, but it it is unique and enjoyable at the end.