From the author of Golden Hill comes a tender, endlessly inventive novel that resurrects five children killed in a wartime bomb-blast and asks what kind of a future these working-class youths would have had.
Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2021.
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?
Ingenious and profound, full of warmth and beauty, Light Perpetual is a story of the everyday, the miraculous and the everlasting - a sweeping and intimate celebration of the gift of life.
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 9780571336494
Number of pages: 336
Weight: 279 g
Dimensions: 198 x 129 x 20 mm
Edition: Main
The beautifully written highly inventive novel has got a dramatic opening chapter. One Saturday in November 1944 a German V2 bomb explodes in Woolworths in South-East London killing everyone inside instantly. Among... More
This came up for request on NetGalley only a month or so after I had read Golden Hill which I really enjoyed. It takes as its starting point the V2 bombing of Woolworths on New Cross Road on a busy Saturday lunchtime... More
I was privileged to be able to review this book on NetGalley prior to publication. This is one of the most enjoyable books I have read in a long time, such beautiful writing of a truly imaginative story telling the... More
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