If anything, Light Perpetual is even bolder than Golden Hill while in no way resembling it. It is a new departure – a brilliant, attention-grabbing, capacious experiment with fiction ... The novel opens with a poised, detailed and audacious description of the bomb itself exploding. There is a sprightly life to the writing that is in contrast to the appalling devastation it describes ... His elegant structure allows time to pass rapidly, imaginatively leaping 15 years at a stretch, leading us, engrossingly, through history ... the evocation of period is skilful, the smell of London buses spot-on ... Spufford is an artful non-dodger. He gravitates towards describing, with vivid exactitude, what other novelists might be relieved to duck ... Spufford is so comprehensively convincing that you keep unreasonably suspecting him of having experienced everything he describes. Extraordinary and ordinary things happen. Happiness, in his hands, writes multicoloured. But the poignancy throughout is in being reminded that, in his characters’ lives and in ours, even inconsequential moments matter ... What makes the novel original is that we orientate ourselves in it in a new way. The usual suspension of disbelief is replaced by a back-to-front sadness in being compelled to keep remembering that not a single moment ­– exceptional or mundane – in this literary soap opera happened. The imagined afterlife was stalled before it started ... Spufford is a lay representative of the diocese of Ely and has, as a writer, a Christian heart without ever being off-puttingly pious. Light Perpetual is an exercise in gratitude, enhancing the sense that it is a fluke that we’re here at all. It is a meditation on death, too, with an entertaining warmth that does not cancel out its melancholy. It may be less uplifting than Golden Hill but its serious purpose dignifies it. Fiction depends on “what ifs” and in Light Perpetual, fiction is a form of mercy.

... resonant ... Out of contemplative pauses in front of that plaque, Mr. Spufford has created an extraordinary novel in terms of its variety of character, symphonic language and spiritual reach ... This plot structure can sound formulaic, plodding even. And, certainly, the pitfalls of sentimentality are many in a story that imagines 'what might have been' for five dead children...But Mr. Spufford is no Whittier, and his characters, as they move decade-by-decade through their imagined lives, are no mere static types ... Even to tick off these characters and their stories in this fashion renders them reductive in a way that Mr. Spufford never does. He’s such a beautiful writer, casually stunning in his language and perceptions ... Along with incisively and often wittily describing the imagined progression—and setbacks—of his characters’ lives, Mr. Spufford also conjures up an impressionistic history of six decades of London life ... It’s all so engrossing. And, then, inevitably, a shattering awareness intrudes: these lives are even more heartbreakingly imagined than is typical in works of fiction. Again and again, a reader is drawn into their mundane particularity and, again and again, one remembers the explosion that cut those five futures short in 1944. In resurrecting lives that never were, Light Perpetual is a miracle, not only of art but of encompassing empathy—it becomes not only about the terribly brief lives of these five fictional children, but of the finitude that bounds all the living and the dead.

... a resonant novel about what 'might have been' for five young casualties of war, as well as a God's-eye meditation on mutability and loss ... This plot structure can sound formulaic, plodding even. And, certainly, the pitfalls of sentimentality are many in a story that imagines the lives that five invented dead children might have led. But Spufford avoids those pitfalls and as he moves his children through their imagined lives they become so much more than mere reverent icons ... Even to tick off these characters and their stories in this fashion renders them reductive in a way that Spufford never does. He's such a beautiful writer, casually stunning in his language and perceptions ... Along with incisively describing the progression — and setbacks — of his fictional children's lives, Spufford conjures up an impressionistic history of six decades of London life ... Again and again, Spufford draws us readers into the mundane particularity of his maturing characters' lives and, again and again, we readers are jolted by the awareness that those five futures were cut short in 1944. In resurrecting lives that never were, Light Perpetual is a miracle, not only of art, but of encompassing empathy. The novel becomes not only about the terribly brief lives of these five fictional children, but of the finitude that bounds all the living and the dead.

... an opening that is brilliantly written and somewhat misleading. As minutely knowledgeable details of the deadly build-up inside the V2’s warhead segue into theories of time and intimations of otherworldly dimensions, Light Perpetual looks set to explore an abstruse region where physics, philosophy and theology interact. Yet for the most part, despite an occasional fleeting sheen of mysticism, what follows is a solidly traditional novel ... Through his characters’ successes and setbacks, partnerships and realisations, Spufford displays shifting attitudes and altered assumptions about class, money, marriage, the media, music, sport, gender roles and race relations ... London’s history is ever-present. So is its diversity ... Allusions to light and time recur, sometimes suggesting transcendental significance. But the novel’s overarching feat is to resurrect with marvellous vitality not just its central five figures, but six transformative decades of London life.

... a kind of radiant goodness, a sense that the world is a better place for having such books within them ... a pleasingly collaborative reading experience ... It’s a book that is also a social history of South London, showing the frictions and fissures, the ugly insularity as well as the generosity and decency ... Light Perpetual’s brilliance lies in the emotion and drama it wrings from the ordinary — but profoundly meaningful — experiences of its protagonists. Spufford’s prose, which is never showy, but always beautifully accurate, confers an extraordinary dignity on the lives of these imagined children, recovered from the rubble of a fictional bomb site.

... vividly imagined ... A nonfiction writer turned novelist, Spufford is a stickler for carefully researched detail ... Spufford is a fluent writer, bringing a deft touch to the emotional force fields of parents and their children. I think I was as moved as Jo was when she first hears a version of one of her old, abandoned songs remixed, in loops and samples, by her son. But Spufford can also be overly controlling of his characters, mechanically matching them up with nonwhite partners or tethering their fates via unlikely coincidences ... Equally intrusive is Spufford’s distracting practice of lacing his character’s thoughts with literary allusions ... The good are rewarded. The wicked are punished. But the supreme being, doling out just deserts to the five kids rescued from Woolworth’s, is of course Spufford himself. I wish he had cut his richly drawn characters a little more slack.

Francis Spufford is a master of the set piece. His great skill is to breathe life into almost any scene ... It is, for the most part, a quiet, contemplative book about the imagined future lives of children killed in a German V2 attack in the Blitz. It is slow burning where Golden Hill was fast and impetuous; its action ranges across the second half of the 20th century ... Both novels, however, are tessellated together from vivid social scenes ... The individuals at the heart of the novel are not real, nor is the London borough of Bexford where they are raised. Moreover, they lead lives so ordinary that their continued existence in no way changes the alignment of real-world events. I couldn’t help feeling the concept undermined the book rather than strengthened it, especially since the rest of the novel is a powerful reminder of the virtues of invention ... the novel teems with life experience. Spufford can evoke what it feels like to drive through LA at night ... If Spufford wrote Golden Hill with Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson peering over his shoulder, the presiding spirit in Light Perpetual is Virginia Woolf ... Light Perpetual is a book with a quiet Christian sensibility. It extols the power of love and goodwill.

... gorgeous ... trains our attention on everyday life and seemingly unremarkable people, those who, as George Eliot wrote, 'lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs' ... Spufford is less interested in how people with different dispositions and capabilities 'end up' than in specific moments, be they routine, wondrous, or horrifying, that make up the texture of a life, events that make it worth living or a living hell ... Spufford is uncannily good at capturing the allure such boys exert over a certain kind of girl. This, too, is a high point, an interlude picked out as if by a spotlight, in which Val feels especially alive ... the sort of novel that’s carried by its descriptions, passages that transform the ordinary into the transcendent and leave us marveling ... The peril with this approach, of course, is that we might miss the goals—an author’s vision might dissolve into merely a page full of words. Spufford almost always strikes the right balance, although his restraint does fail him in the book’s overlong opening scene ... Ben may close the novel with a paean to the creator that he and his inventor (Spufford has written about his Christian faith) believe in. But this genial novel makes space for readers who believe that nothing is eternal.

... dazzling ... Spufford is well known among some readers as a thoughtful defender of Christianity in his 2012 book Unapologetic, and Light Perpetual is also quietly slanted in this direction...It means that behind every description of a shaft of sunlight or a flickering match hovers the suggestion that such moments offer glimpses of a happy ending that isn’t possible on Earth. Yet for the most part what Spufford appears to be most interested in redeeming is not individual human souls but time itself ... Whereas in real life we tend to experience time as a messy blur, with one thing melting into another too quickly to be properly understood, Spufford knows that a novel can hold up individual moments until they catch the light and then permanently fix them in writing ... Such moments do more than irradiate ordinary life. They also confirm the reputation that Spufford gained with his previous novel, Golden Hill, as one of the finest prose stylists of his generation. If his stories grip, his sentences practically glow.

... Spufford’s generous writing style combines a close-up view of events with a distant perspective ... exhilarating ... Elements of a serial or family saga are part of the pleasure, alongside narrative shocks, comic moments, horrifying incidents and moving contemplations of past and present ... Spufford’s tone is benign and unsatirical throughout, with the occasional hint of malice ... Quotations from songs and prayers, and moments of intense meditation, provide a counterbalance to the detailed descriptions of daily life and return the continuing narratives to the original metaphysical impetus and the idea that everyone is the centre of a world around which events assemble.

Spufford points to the elasticity of time behind our 'rickety scaffolding of hours and minutes', and avoids a chronological trudge through these five connected lives. This lends Light Perpetual its element of streamlined Modernist architecture. However, within each scene his 'arrangement of fragments' feels solidly traditional in its styling and furnishing. We get to know each character in action, through smartly choreographed and beautifully observed set-pieces – classrooms, parties, weddings, sermons, discos, fights. We follow the movements, private and public, that transform the people and their city while leaving much untouched in the messy aftermath of war ... This is only an average-sized novel, but it casts an epic shadow ... As in real life, we periodically lose touch with Spufford’s un-famous five, then meet again after a long gap. If these 15-year leaps present problems of continuity for an ensemble piece like this, they also let us grasp that the rhythms of time rap out syncopations and discontinuities as often as regular beats. People, like times, can change, and fast ... this novel simply excels in the stop-time rapture of noticing, in detail, ordinary-extraordinary people and the things they make and do ... gives back what history stole: the time of their lives.

... graceful ... a clever commentary on the changes in Western society as seen through Spufford’s characters ... derives considerable power from dramatizing the experiences its characters missed: the chance to build and lose a fortune, to see one’s dreams realized or else rerouted toward more modest achievements, or just to hold a loved one’s hand. Spufford shrewdly reminds readers that tragedy deprives the world of not only noble people but also scoundrels, and this fact is part of the fabric of history ... That’s the biggest message of this book: A road might lead to a dead end, but the journey could still be worthwhile.

Spufford makes his characters resonate with the everyday miracle of what it is to be human, touched both by evil and by good, their lives moulded, too, by the social, cultural, political and indeed technological changes of the second half of the 20th century. We care about what happens to them next ... Spufford remains cautiously optimistic about the potential for human redemption ... it’s in its rendition of the here-and-now, rather than in any theological striving after the eternal, that this book truly comes to life.

The tastes, smells, sounds and touch of various moments, time periods and locations are so vivid that readers might well feel that they had actually experienced these things themselves. Ben’s mental health problems and internal chatter are particularly well expressed — sympathetically but without the usual recourse to melodrama ... Spufford elevates time’s passage to an almost spiritual experience. This could become tiresome and sluggish in the hands of a less deft, less emotionally present author, but here it is a thing of beauty — elegant but completely devoid of pretension. And so easy to read ... London — its characteristics, its people, its sheer energy — is captured on every page. If you’re a lover of that heaving mass of humanity, you will be pleased ... Given the starting point — the purposeless cutting short of the lives of this crowd of innocent, ordinary people — you could expect this book to be heavy going. And there is an underlying poignancy because we know that these intricate, hearty lives were never lived past that day in 1944...Yet this is a light-filled, uplifting book. Original in its themes and structure, it is food for the spirit. A meditation on time, life and death, almost. A realistic ode to life itself in all its horror and joy that, strangely, leaves the reader with a profound sense of peace.

You may know people like Alec, Ben, Jo, Val and Vernon, but Spufford’s skilful way with character development makes them more than types. They are buffeted by history’s convulsions but they aren’t passive actors; they shape the world as much as it shapes them ... Spufford writes sensitively about ageing and the kind of big questions that are rarely articulated ... The way the characters grow is often surprising but never implausible ... there are some moments of jarring working-class dialogue and even racial stereotypes ... this novel is more successful when grounded in the everyday ... could be returned to years from now but, at the moment, it is undeniably moving to read a novel that celebrates the incalculable impact of every individual life.

This is only Spufford's second novel but it proves him already fully-formed as a novelist. It combines a playful structure with the charms of old fashioned storytelling, both telegramming the fundamental artifice of novels – the sheer bloody lie of them, inventing at whim entire lives that never existed – while making you believe wholesale in every detail of its characters existence ... Such unexpected transformations of a mundane moment or object into something transcendent glint throughout this novel like a golden thread. The grit and spit of the book is social, as it maps through the decades the slow gentrification of shabby streets, the merciless modernisation of old working practices, the replacement of white working classes with migrant communities. Yet its heart and soul is cosmic, concerned with the metaphysics of time, the unfathomable workings of the sublime and with how tiny, in the infinite scheme of things, our lives really are ... Spufford is less sure-footed on dialogue, partly because he keeps using cockney as a hackneyed signifier for how south Londoners speak. He's capable of describing pretty much anything he wants, but that doesn't mean he always should: the novel absolutely heaves with detail ... One wonders, too, if he needs his opening chapter to remind us of the conceptual affinity between 'what if' and storytelling and whether, if it’s straightforward poignancy he is after, that chapter might have had greater impact coming at the end ... Yet Spufford is interested in more subtle reflections. He has given his characters the gift of life, but that doesn't mean he has to give them fulfilment or even happiness ... A novel can offer the promise of redemption, but just like the wider, unknown mechanics of the universe, Spufford reminds us that what a novelist giveth he can also take away.

By choosing five characters from a similar geographical area of London, Spufford demonstrates the fickle nature of opportunity, the importance of luck, and also the constancy and reinvention of the self that happens throughout a lifetime ... There are so many passages of dazzling lucidity in Light Perpetual, and the discrete characters allow Spufford to display his poetic prowess in a variety of contexts ... However, it is London itself that provide the most transcendent moments in this fine, if misdirected, novel ... Spufford delivers this to the reader in juicy morsels, providing a rich and textured study of a city and some of the many hidden lives that it has punished and nurtured with its formidable indifference.

It’s a novel about their individual stories, all interesting and convincing in their twists and turns, ups and downs, some of the downs very deep. But it is also a social novel, one that follows the transformation of a mostly white working-class district of South London into a multicultural society in which the headmaster of a local comprehensive finds that only a minority of children have English as their first language ... There’s a lot of music and examination of recording techniques – too much for my taste, because it is beyond my understanding, but more knowledgeable readers may be fascinated ... One of the strengths of the novel is Spufford’s immersion in his characters’ work. He is a very literary novelist (good) but, unlike many literary novelists he not only remembers that work, everyday employment, plays a huge, even dominating, part in peoples’ lives, but is also able to present that work convincingly, something that many novelists recognized as Great never really managed ... Spufford is a novelist who combines amplitude and a relish for detail. Some of the scenes are perhaps too prolonged, and he doesn’t quite avoid the trap he has set for himself by offering the stories of five lives which only occasionally connect, so that readers interested, in say, Alec’s story or Val’s may be impatient, even bored, when they disappear for 50 pages or more while we read about Vern or Ben. But on the whole he gets away with this, holds one’s attention and interest. In short, this is an admirably ambitious, humane and, mostly, very enjoyable novel.

Their lives are full, dynamic, and ordinary, their twists and turns tied to the turbulence of the late twentieth century. What is extraordinary, the author implies, may be the fragile miracle of life in the first place. Spufford’s second novel swells with the same lively, intimate prose as his celebrated debut, The Golden Hill (2017). But its unconventional framing and larger, more contemporary themes makes it an even stronger book.

... magical ... These narrative threads sometimes overlap, as when an adult Vern, bullied by Alec as a child, inadvertently knocks on Alec’s door while pursuing a property scheme. Watching the roles of bully and victim get reversed as the two of them catch up over tea is both tense and satisfying. Thanks to Spufford’s narrative wizardry, all five protagonists come to vivid life in this spectacularly moving story.

... richly imagined ... While the view is fragmentary and full of gaps, the characters are complex, engaging, memorable. Spufford does indeed bring them to life. He also brings depth and detail to every vignette, from a boy’s view of soccer to hot-lead typesetting, a neo-Nazi concert, or a trip on a double-decker bus. There’s a subtle theme on the war’s legacy woven from references to building and rebuilding. The bigger threads are people and family, change and time, how we hurt, love, and use each other and find or lose ourselves while our brief lives evolve in 'a messy spiral of hours and years' ... Entertaining and unconventional.