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Light Perpetual: A Novel Audiobook
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Publisher Description
From the critically acclaimed and award‑winning author of Golden Hill, a mesmerizing and boldly inventive 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 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.
Ingenious and profound, full of warmth and beauty, Light Perpetual illuminates the shapes of experience, the extraordinariness of the ordinary, the mysteries of memory and expectation, and the preciousness of life.
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“Light Perpetual 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.”
— BookPage (starred review)
Quotes
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“Offers a moving view of how people confront the gap between their expectations and their reality.”
— New Yorker -
“Light Perpetual is something new and brave. With exceptional care…Spufford catches the voices and hopes of five not-dead working-class south Londoners, and the people who change and shape them."
— The Guardian (London) -
“Light Perpetual’s brilliance lies in the emotion and drama it wrings from the ordinary—but profoundly meaningful—experiences of its protagonists.”
— Financial Times (London)
Awards
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A New York Times Notable Book of 2021
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A Slate Magazine Best Book of 2021
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An NPR Best Book of the Year
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A Literary Hub Pick of 2021's Best Books
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About Francis Spufford
Francis Spufford is the author of fiction and nonfiction. His first book, I May Be Some Time, won the Writers’ Guild Award for Best Nonfiction Book of 1996, the Banff Mountain Book Prize, and a Somerset Maugham Award. In nonfiction, Golden Hill won multiple literary prizes on both sides of the Atlantic, and Light Perpetual was longlisted for the Booker Prize. In England he is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Historical Society. He teaches writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
About Imogen Church
Imogen Church, an Earphones Award-winning narrator, trained as an actress at the Drama Centre London, under Christopher Fettes, Yat Malmgren, and Reuven Adiv. Since graduating, she has worked extensively in theater, film, commercials, and comedy sketch work, and she also works regularly as a voice artist. As a screenwriter, her first screenplay won the 2009 award for Best Feature Screenplay at the Reel Women Film Festival in Los Angeles.