Light Perpetual Summary
Francis Spufford

Light Perpetual Overview

In Light Perpetual, Francis Spufford depicts the lives of five fictional characters, tracing their growth from childhood to old age. These five characters function as representatives of children who died in an actual V-2 bombing that occurred in London in 1944. In a sense, Spufford gives these children a chance to live vicariously in the fiction of his story. Told primarily in third person narration, present tense, the novel follows these characters during ordinary days of their lives, at various ages. The characters and events are not extraordinary; rather, the substance of the novel manifests in the emotions that the characters experience in commonplace events.