Blitz spirits: Nonesuch, by Francis Spufford, reviewed
If you read books for a living, the calling probably started with a moment of utter entrancement: a novel you couldn’t bear to set down; a few unforgettable days, as Bleak House, Earthly Powers, The Woman in White or Titus Groan worked its unsuspected magic on its millionth reader. Such books are rarer these days, but they do still happen, and Francis Spufford’s Nonesuch is an absolute corker. Randall Jarrell once wistfully imagined a novel that would ‘bear up under the weight of hundreds of thousands of readers a plot that higher critics could call crude and that bewitched families could pad over in house slippers’. Nonesuch does the trick,
