Nonesuch

His Dark Materials meets the Blitz: the deep satisfactions of children’s literature reclaimed for adults who still want stories in which the world is wondrous.

What a joy! Bejewelled with dazzling prose, propulsive as a rocket, mandala-complex in its worldbuilding, and corkscrewing jubilantly through fantasy, history, romance, occultism, adventure and the wartime Stock Exchange, Nonesuch is a novel with endless ingenuity and an enormous heart.

Nonesuch salts actual history with the conventions of the fantastic in a way that thrills me, but by now that feels like a trademark of Spufford’s writing. Here are the most interesting and terrifying angels and the human characters, too, are so full of life and feeling they practically set fire to the pages as you turn them.

I feel like I've been waiting all my adult life for Nonesuch to come along: a book that scoops up all the wonder and hope and pleasure of the Narnia novels, and pours it into a story for grown-up. The book itself is a kind of enchantment, as powerful as any of the great and harrowing spells cast within its pages, and I was entirely ensorcelled. You simply. Must. Read. This. Book.

I raced through this . . . Francis Spufford could write about pretty much anything and make it your cup of tea.

The balance of historical realism and fantasy is handled with a degree of mastery and attention to detail that is far more convincing than it probably ought to be – and that suggests further complications to come. The novel ends with the tantalizing note ‘‘to be continued’’, promising a second volume that I suspect most readers, like myself, will want to see *right now*.