Spufford, Francis

  • Nonesuch

    £20.00

    It’s the summer of 1939. London is on the brink of catastrophic war, and everybody knows it. On a final night of abandon, Iris Hawkins, an ambitious young financial secretary (and ‘not an entirely good girl’), pursues a one-night stand. Some people, if you make the mistake of sleeping with them, leave you with a rash, or regrets. It seems that sleeping with young Geoff, a technical whizz at the BBC’s nascent television unit, leaves you pursued by a creature from another world. As Britain threatens to fall apart and the Nazi bombs descend, Iris finds herself stepping off the known world’s edge, into a reality where otherworldly powers lurk and act, where spirits can be called and enslaved, where time can be warped and rewound, and where a magical fascist is plotting her path back in time, gun in hand, in search of Churchill, to fire a shot that will end the war before it ever began. Naturally, only Iris can stop her.

  • Cahokia jazz

    £9.99

    In a city that never was, in an America that never was, on a snowy night at the end of winter, two detectives find a body on the roof of a skyscraper. It’s 1922, and Americans are drinking in speakeasies, dancing to jazz, stepping quickly to the tempo of modern times. Beside the Mississippi, the ancient city of Cahokia lives on – a teeming industrial metropolis, containing every race and creed. Among them, peace holds. Just about. But that body on the roof is about to spark off a week that will spill the city’s secrets, and bring it, against a soundtrack of wailing clarinets and gunfire, either to destruction or rebirth.

  • Cahokia jazz – SIGNED

    £20.00

    In a city that never was, in an America that never was, on a snowy night at the end of winter, two detectives find a body on the roof of a skyscraper. It’s 1922, and Americans are drinking in speakeasies, dancing to jazz, stepping quickly to the tempo of modern times. Beside the Mississippi, the ancient city of Cahokia lives on – a teeming industrial metropolis, containing every race and creed. Among them, peace holds. Just about. But that body on the roof is about to spark off a week that will spill the city’s secrets, and bring it, against a soundtrack of wailing clarinets and gunfire, either to destruction or rebirth.

  • Light Perpetual

    £8.99

    November 1944. A German rocket incinerates a South London household-goods store, and five young lives are atomised in an instant. Jo and Valerie and Alec and Ben and Vernon are gone. But what if it were possible to resurrect them – to let them experience the extraordinary, unimaginable changes of the twentieth century; to live out all the personal triumphs and disasters, the second chances and redemptions denied them? What kind of future would there be for clever, impulsive Alec? What would happen to Val in the world of men, beckoning beyond her all-female household? What would become of Vern’s greed – and his helplessness in the face of song? Would light or darkness fill Ben’s fragile mind? And where would Jo go, with the music playing in her head?