A thrilling tale of murder and mystery in a city where history has run a little differently — from the bestselling author of Golden Hill.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.The multiple-award-winning Francis Spufford returns, with a lovingly created, richly pleasure-giving, epically scaled tale set in the golden age of wicked entertainments.

When Captain Scott died in 1912 on his way back from the South Pole, his story became a myth embedded in the British imagination. Despite wars and social change, despite recent debunking, it is still there. Everyone remembers the last words of Scott's companion Captain Oates - 'I'm just going outside, and I may be some time' - and history is what you can remember. Conventional histories of polar exploration trace the laborious expeditions across the map, dwelling on the proper techniques of ice-navigation and sledge-travel. Historians rarely ask what the explorers thought they were doing, orwhy they did these insane things. But this book is about the poles as they have been perceived, dreamed, even desired. It explores myth as myth, showing how Scott's death was the culmination of a long-running national enchantment. Francis Spufford reveals an extraordinary history of feeling - the call of vast empty spaces, the beauty of untrodden snow - as he pieces together the elements of a myth...

A spellbinding tale about an ambitious young woman who must thwart an occult plot by time-traveling fascists during the chaos of the London Blitz—from "one of our most powerful writers of wayward historical fiction" (The Washington Post).Following the acclaim of his previous novels Golden Hill and Cahokia Jazz, Francis Spufford delivers a masterpiece of literary fantasy, hailed by Joe Hill as "a book that scoops up all the wonder and hope and pleasure of the Narnia novels, and pours it into a story for grown-ups." It's the summer of 1939, and the air in London is thick with the tension of impending war. Iris Hawkins, a fiery young financial secretary, has a chance encounter with Geoff, a genius engineer from the new technology of television. What was supposed to be one night of abandon draws her instead into a nightmare of otherworldly pursuit—into a reality where time bends, spirits can be summoned, and history hangs by a...

AVAILABLE TO PREORDER NOWNovember 1944. A German rocket strikes London, and five young lives are atomised in an instant.November 1944. That rocket never lands. A single second in time is altered, and five young lives go on - to experience all the unimaginable changes of the twentieth century. Because maybe there are always other futures. Other chances.From the best-selling, prize-winning author of Golden Hill, Light Perpetual is a story of the everyday, the miraculous and the everlasting. Ingenious and profound, full of warmth and beauty, it is a sweeping and intimate celebration of the gift of life.

An irresistible collection of favorite writings from an author celebrated for his bravura style and sheer unpredictabilityFrancis Spufford's welcome first volume of collected essays gathers an array of his compelling writings from the 1990s to the present. He makes use of a variety of encounters with particular places, writers, or books to address deeper questions relating to the complicated relationship between story-telling and truth-telling. How must a nonfiction writer imagine facts, vivifying them to bring them to life? How must a novelist create a dependable world of story, within which facts are, in fact, imaginary? And how does a religious faith felt strongly to be true, but not provably so, draw on both kinds of writerly imagination? Ranging freely across topics as diverse as the medieval legends of Cockaigne, the Christian apologetics of C. S. Lewis, and the tomb of Ayatollah Khomeini, Spufford provides both fresh observations and thought-provoking...

Children's books - from Narnia to The Hobbit - are celebrated in this enlightened examination of the joys of childhood reading.Fairy tales and Where the Wild Things Are, The Lord of the Rings and the Narnia books, Little House on the Prairie and The Earthsea Trilogy. What would you find if you went back and re-read your favourite books from childhood? Francis Spufford discovers both delight and sadness, in this widely celebrated memoir of a boy who retreats into books, faced with a tragedy in his family.'A beautifully composed and wholly original memoir, sounding the classics of children's literature.' David Sexton, Evening Standard'Exuberant and serious, funny and sophisticated, this memoir of reading and childhood is a delight.' Andrea Ashworth

New York, a small town on the tip of Manhattan island, 1746.One rainy evening in November, a handsome young stranger fresh off the boat pitches up at a counting-house door in Golden Hill Street: this is Mr Smith, amiable, charming, yet strangely determined to keep suspicion simmering. For in his pocket, he has what seems to be an order for a thousand pounds, a huge amount, and he won't explain why, or where he comes from, or what he can be planning to do in the colonies that requires so much money. Should the New York merchants trust him? Should they risk their credit and refuse to pay? Should they befriend him, seduce him, arrest him; maybe even kill him? As fast as a heist movie, as stuffed with incident as a whole shelf of conventional fiction, Golden Hill is both a novel about the 18th century, and itself a book cranked back to the novel's 18th century beginnings, when anything could happen on the page, and usually did, and a hero was not a hero...

A brilliant, beautiful account of how British boffins triumphed across the decades in creating everything from computer games to Martian landers.The book contains chapters on the Beagle II, Elite - the 80s computer game, the Blue Streak missile, Concorde, mobile phone technology and the Human Genome Project, among others.Britain is the only country in the world to have cancelled its space programme just as it put its first rocket into orbit. Starting with this forgotten episode, 'Backroom Boys' tells the bittersweet story of how one country lost its industrial tradition and got back something else. Sad, inspiring, funny and ultimately triumphant, it follows the technologists whose work kept Concorde flying, created the computer game, conquered the mobile-phone business, saved the human genome for the human race - and who now are sending the Beagle 2 probe to burrow in the cinnamon sands of Mars. 'Backroom Boys' is a vivid love-letter to quiet...

Unapologetic is a brief, witty, personal, sharp-tongued defence of Christianity, taking on Dawkins' The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens' God is Not Great.Its argument is that Christianity is recognisable, drawing on the deep and deeply ordinary vocabulary of human feeling, satisfying those who believe by offering a ruthlessly realistic account of the bits of our lives advertising agencies prefer to ignore. It's a book for believers who are fed up with being patronised, for non-believers curious about how faith can possibly work in the twenty-first century, and for anyone who feels there is something indefinably wrong, literalistic, anti-imaginative and intolerant about the way the case for atheism is now being made.Fresh, provoking and unhampered by niceness, this is the long-awaited riposte to the smug emissaries of New Atheism.