Life (And Magic) During Wartime: Review of Francis Spufford’s Nonesuch

Abigail Nussbaum Under Review:Nonesuch. Francis Spufford. Faber & Faber, February 2026. In 2021, Francis Spufford published Light Perpetual, a novel that was, in a somewhat roundabout fashion, about the effects of the Blitz on the people who experienced it, and the different forms that British society and individuals took in the wake of WWII. In the novel’s opening chapter, Spufford delivered a minutely detailed, millisecond-by-millisecond description of a V2 rocket impacting on, and destroying, a London department store. Something about the nearly unprecedented intrusion of such a form of warfare, its immense, horrifying power to destroy but also transform, seems to have germinated in Spufford. Five years later, it has produced an entirely different, but no less riveting, sort of story. Despite a shared fascination with the war, Spufford’s latest novel, Nonesuch, does not have a great deal in common with Light Perpetual. The earlier novel was about people who were children during the…