Francis Spufford

Jordan Peterson is one of those curious figures who has, thanks to the mysterious operations of the internet, been thrust into the limelight, willingly or not. While he has become a locus of hatred for certain left-wingers, thanks to his implacable attitude toward “woke” phenomena, in reality his supposedly controversial advice amounts to little more than that young people should work hard and take responsibility for their actions. Even the bolshiest socialist couldn’t really disagree. His 12 Rules for Life is a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, and he has a large and adoring fanbase.

If you are a male, middle-aged, middle-class novelist, do not despair of being deemed unpublishable in our era of identity politics. On both sides of the Atlantic, the smartest chaps have turned away from the interiority of literary fiction. From Colson Whitehead and Marlon James to Mick Herron and Charles Cumming, they now write detective fiction, speculative fantasy, or a combination of the two. Francis Spufford, the award-winning author of best-selling novels such as Golden Hill, has come up with a zinger. Cahokia Jazz is set in a 1920s city in a counterfactual America. Here, the native Americans were not fatally weakened by a deadly strain of smallpox, but experienced the milder version which has just a 1 percent mortality rate and confers immunity.