Light Perpetual: A Novel

Written by:
Francis Spufford
Narrated by:
Imogen Church

Unabridged Audiobook

Ratings
Book
3
Narrator
2
Release Date
May 2021
Duration
12 hours 37 minutes
Summary
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.
Reviews
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Ruthless621

I really enjoyed this book! As others have mentioned, the first couple chapters were a bit much and a little confusing. But what I found so lovely about this book was the use of language. The incredibly precise use of exacting vocabulary to paint the most vivid images and and bring the characters inner thoughts and feelings to life. If you love words…this book will be greatly enjoyed. If you need a seamlessly well-knitted tale as well, it may get under your skin. The narrator was absolutely delightful! Just wonderful!

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