Nonesuch: A Novel
by Francis Spufford
Pub Date Mar 10 2026
Scribner
DESCRIPTION/SYNOPSIS:
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).
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 thread.
Soon there are Nazi planes droning overhead. In a time when death falls randomly from above each night, when the streets are darker than the wildest forest and all the men are away in uniform, the defense of the city is in the hands of its women. But Iris has more to contend with than just the terrors of the Blitz. Over the rooftops of burning London, in the twisted passages between past and present, through the vast night sky and across the tiny screens of early television, a fascist fanatic is traveling with a gun in her hand, and only Iris can stop her from altering the course of history forever.
REVIEW:
Nonesuch took me longer to get to than I had hoped but I really enjoyed reading this novel from an author unfamiliar to me. The supernatural-mixed-with-World-War-II-London premise seemed interesting and drew me in. I haven’t read much at all about what England experienced during the bombing in the early days (months) of the war, though I had seen it portrayed in various films. It comes across as simultaneously surreal and terrifying, yet the Londoners adapted to the nightly horror of random death and destruction while maintaining their daily routines with admirable courage. Watching other countries fall to Hitler’s forces one after another like a row of falling dominoes getting closer and closer to their home and country is a recipe for encroaching dread even without the supernatural threat of the timeline being wiped out of existence and being replaced with… what? A world in which defeat has not only come, but without a whimper of protest.
Iris, a thoroughly modern woman for her time, decides that uncertainty in the face of war is eminently better than having the world rewritten with surrender a fait accompli. Despite her own modern sensibility, she falls for Geoff, an earnest, old-fashioned young man who is a talented engineer but spends much of the story fighting for the country by employing his technical acumen. This leaves Iris on her own, by day working for a financial investment firm where she demonstrates her own talent in the world of finance, attempting to rise above the expectations of her gender, and by night trying to thwart those who want to rewrite the timeline to accommodate the fascists. Seems Geoff’s father was a functionary in a cult that stumbled in the ability to imprison angels in architecture, specifically large sculptures adorning large buildings, to serve their own purposes. A daughter of one such cult member becomes Iris’ nemesis in the battle to preserve/rewrite the timeline.
Iris is an engaging and involved protagonist, while her nemesis is suitably frightening and determined despite her comparatively diminutive stature. Though the tension of the encroaching forces of the Third Reich is mediated by our knowledge of how the war ended, the possibility of someone changing the timeline creates an existential threat that makes such knowledge irrelevant and adds considerably to the tension. I was expecting more in the way of time travel during the course of the story, rather than preparations to allow time travel to occur, but the difficulties of setting the pieces in motion was effectively suspenseful throughout.
As I neared the end of the novel, I sensed a poignant ending approaching — and I was prepared to absorb that as the end of Iris’ story… but, I must reveal, the book ends in a cliffhanger! A promised second book is coming. Stay tuned…
Note: I received an eGalley of Nonesuch from the publisher via NetGalley in consideration of an unbiased review.
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