What a stonker of a novel. An all-encompassing masterpiece layering themes of dark magic, fascism, romance and time travel, all while dripping in vivid historical detail and humour. Francis Spufford’s Nonesuch is a riot.
Set in 1939 as London finds itself on the brink of war, our narrator is the bright, ambitious, working-class Iris Hawkins, who works as a clerk in the City. One evening Iris finds herself at an arts club where she meets Lady Lalage Cunningham (“Lall”, a movie star kind of beauty and a fascist) along with Geoff Hale, a nerdy BBC engineer, whom she ends up seducing simply to annoy Lall. It is as she attempts to sneak off after their encounter at his father’s house that she looks out of Geoff’s bedroom window and sees something watching her — a figure with inhumane movements and an “incomprehensibly wrong” face.
