Francis Spufford

Light Perpetual

Alice Myles

Thanks to NetGalley and Faber and Faber for the advanced copy of this book

I'm always very hit or miss when it comes to literary fiction and unfortunately for me, this was a miss! The concept sounded so intriguing and I was instantly intrigued to read it and I really wanted to love it but it just didn't hit home for me. This is a reimagining of what a group of characters lives could have been like had they not died in an explosion as children but with this happening at the very beginning of the book I had no time to get attached to any of the characters maybe if the explosion was revealed at the end after spending the time getting invested it may have struck home for me better. This book is basically all about the characters but I just didn't care about any of them I enjoyed finding out what they were getting up to at each stage but I didn't care about what actually happened to them. One thing I liked was how it portrayed different people at the same stage in life living completely different lives with completely different problems showing how not everyone travels through life at the same pace. All in all just not for me but I'm sure some other people will absolutely love it.

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.

A Novel

It's like a 3.5ish.

The characterization is great. There is a character with anxiety and the way it is described is so vivid and feels so realistic that it is likely going to stick with me. The main issue for me was trying to keep the characters straight. I can remember them generally, but there are too many that even with the help of the names before switching the point of view, I had a quick mental gymnastics of who is who.and that really takes me out of the novel and into my own head, which isn't where I'd like to be. 

Definitely like the range of lives and situations that was covered, just wish that maybe more plotting was done to make the vignettes more coherent as a book.

Light Perpetual

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