Francis Spufford

A thrilling tale of murder and mystery in a city where history has run a little differently -- from the best-selling author of Golden Hill. 'Utterly immersive.' Spectator 'Thrilling.' Financial Times 'Unlike anything else you will read this year.' Daily Express 'A classic of alternative history.' Observer 'A delight.' Sunday Telegraph It's 1922 and Americans are drinking in speakeasies, dancing...

What would you find if you went back and re-read your favourite books from childhood? In The Child That Books Built, Francis Spufford revisits all those childhood obsessions: fairy tales; Where the Wild Things Are; The Lord of the Rings; The Chronicles of Narnia; Little House on the Prairie; The Wind in the Willows; The Earthsea Trilogy and more. In...

New York, a small town on the tip of Manhattan Island, 1746. One rainy evening, a charming and handsome young stranger fresh off the boat from England pitches up to a counting house on Golden Hill Street with a suspicious yet compelling proposition — he has an order for a thousand pounds in his pocket that he wishes to cash....

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...

The Soviet Union was founded on a fairytale. It was built on 20th century magic called 'the planned economy', which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the penny-pinching lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working. Red...

An irresistible collection of favourite writings from an author celebrated for his bravura style and sheer unpredictability. Francis 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...

But it isn't an argument that Christianity is true – because how could anyone know that (or indeed its opposite)? It's an argument that Christianity is recognisable, drawing on the deep and deeply ordinary vocabulary of human feeling, satisfying those who believe in it by offering a ruthlessly realistic account of the bits of our lives advertising agencies prefer to...

November 1944. A German rocket strikes London and five young children are atomised in an instant. Here are the futures they might have known, had they experienced the unimaginable changes of the twentieth century — futures that illuminate the miraculous in the everyday, and the preciousness of life itself. ‘My god he can write. One of the best opening chapters...

'ONE OF THE MOST ORIGINAL MINDS IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE' - NICK HORNBY 'A TREMENDOUSLY VARIED AND SURPRISING WRITER' - GUARDIAN It's the summer of 1939. London is on the brink of catastrophic war. Iris Hawkins, an ambitious young woman in the stuffy world of City finance, has a chance encounter with Geoff, a technical whizz at the BBC's nascent television...