Francis Spufford's fourth novel is a gripping, otherworldly fantasy set during the London Blitz
Alice O'KeeffeIn a nutshell, I read books for a living. I interview authors for The Bookseller's weekly Author Profile slot and write the monthly New
...moreIn a first for the multi-award-winning author, his latest novel Nonesuch blends historical fiction with fantasy in a wartime adventure.
In a nutshell, I read books for a living. I interview authors for The Bookseller's weekly Author Profile slot and write the monthly New
...moreAround the turn of the last century, Francis Spufford was having lunch with his nonagenarian grandmother at Veeraswamy on Regent Street, London’s oldest Indian restaurant. “We came in and sat down, and she looked around and went, ‘Oh, I was last here in 1935, it hasn’t changed much.’ And then she said, apropos of absolutely nothing: ‘I always preferred going out with married men, because they always spent so much more money on you.’” Nancy Spufford then clammed up, leaving her grandson none the wiser.
But his latest novel, the incomparable Nonesuch, is dedicated to her, and his protagonist, Iris Hawkins, was partly inspired, he tells me, by the “slightly wicked desire to speculate about the private life of my grandmother… I will never find out what really happened to her, but I can invent my way in”.
Nonesuch is a love letter to the capital, specifically the Square Mile, London’s ancient heart, where Iris Hawkins, bright and determined, is part of the typing pool for the stuffy brokerage of Cornellis & Blome. Since reading Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch, Spufford tells me he has been fascinated by “the strange, ambiguous time of liberty for women that opened up during the war, when suddenly all the rules of an extremely patriarchal society were suspended, as if they’d never weighed anything anyway”. He wondered what such a freedom, albeit temporary, “would be like for somebody with her elbows out, determined to rise in a world unfriendly to a young woman [who is] ambitious and clever… and a bit ruthless”.
The tiredness [of the Blitz] was the thing that really, really struck me… also, in some ways, the thing that I thought we most needed help as contemporary observers to get inside
The year is 1939 and the world is about to change beyond all recognition, but for now, Iris is mostly concerned with having a good time. A night out in Soho ends with her taking a cab home with the unworldly Geoff, a technical whizz in the BBC’s new television unit, back to his place for a night of passion. Afterwards, she is planning to leave quietly until the glimpse of something “impossible” on the street below marks the beginning of an extraordinary otherworldly adventure that will unfold as the Luftwaffe’s relentless bombing raids seek to obliterate the city. It was a time, says Spufford, that “the stakes of good and evil came very close to the surface”, making it a “natural setting for fantasy”.
Nonesuch is Spufford’s fourth novel (after five non-fiction books) but his first, full-blown fantasy, albeit grounded in a superbly realised London during the Blitz. “I’ve had a terrible – or wonderful – compulsion to take one step left out of straight history and give my imagination the extra elbow room. You could say that doing it as a fantasy this time is the same impulse showing up in a slightly different way.” He found a “special freedom” in writing a fantasy novel “but it didn’t feel like unfamiliar ground”.
His debut, the critically-acclaimed, Costa First Novel-winning Golden Hill, is a historical novel set in 18th-century New York, then a small, gossipy town unrecognisable from the heaving metropolis it is today: “Layering the familiar and the unfamiliar together and taking [readers] to a New York they’d never seen and making it feel solid and real is the kind of world-building you do in fantasy. It’s a process of solidifying the imaginary so that your reader can walk around it along with you. And I love doing that.”
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On blending fantasy with historical fiction, Spufford says: “I don’t think that one is irresponsible make-believe, and the other is fidelity to the true past. I think that getting inside the past in good historical fiction always requires an effort of imagination first… since fiction is in the business of truth rather than facts anyway, you are allowed to have fantastic truths as a way of approaching the real texture and feel of past time.”
Alongside the magical aspects, Nonesuch captures the experience of the Blitz, the culminative sheer bloody exhaustion of being bombed for 50-odd nights on the trot, in a way I have not read before in fiction: “The tiredness was the thing that really, really struck me in contemporary descriptions, and also, in some ways, the thing that I thought we most needed help as contemporary observers to get inside.
“It’s easy to imagine that some terrible crisis or trauma happens, and then you get over it. But the idea that it happens nightly, and then the next day you get out of bed, remove the rubble from around your front door, go and see if the bus stop’s still there, if it isn’t, walk to the next bus stop and then somehow get to work and then do a day’s work, if the office is still there. Then come home, rapidly assemble something to eat before you have to go and hide underground again. And then do it over and over and over again. That I thought was astonishing and worth dwelling on, and worth giving all of the imaginative assistance I could come up with to try and get us inside it.”
Amid the nightly devastation of the city, and her nascent love affair with Geoff, Iris has another preoccupation entirely. Revealed to her is a parallel world, one where time bends, angels appear, statues come to life and the past and the present are no longer fixed. And she encounters her nemesis, Lal, properly Lady Lalage Cunningham – “a kind of Unity Mitford knock-off but more athletic and more formidable and more scarily naïve, I hope” – an icy blonde fascist with links to a mysterious Order who may prove more dangerous for Iris than any bomb.
The angels of Nonesuch are not those of the romantic Victorian imagination; not one is playing a harp or weeping prettily over a grave. “My angels, when they’re not in human form, are basically Book of Ezekiel angels, cogs rotating on hills in dimensions that give you a headache just to look at them,” says Spufford. He also liked the idea of using Christian mythology for storytelling purposes; “I wanted something where it felt as if the stakes were extremely high. If you invent all of your own magical flora and fauna, then they’re just yours, they don’t have resonance and depth to them. I wanted these ones to feel as if they touched on something bigger and more permanent and more out of scale.”
Nonesuch is a rollicking read. Superbly plotted, it thunders along at breakneck speed until the gasp-inducing, heartbreaking final twist. It is the very definition of a page-turner and the best news you will have all day is that it is the first in a duology, with Arkady to follow next year. “When I finish writing a novel, there is a weird combination of pleasure and relief, but also just a kind of sorrow that you don’t get to have that stuff in your head anymore. To live with, think about and brood over, and treat those imaginary people as real. I really didn’t want to say goodbye to Iris and Geoff. Iris most of all.”
Metadata
Imprint Faber
Publication 26th February 2026
Formats HB (9780571397167, £20); EB (9780571397198, £14.99)
Rights sold US (Scribner)
Editor Alex Bowler
Agent Clare Alexander, Aitken Alexander
