rancis Spufford kills off all the protagonists of his new novel in the first chapter. “I want the reader to be looking at life as you do when you are aware that the alternative is death,” he explains of Light Perpetual, the follow-up to his award-winning debut, Golden Hill. “I want life and being in time to be less taken for granted than it usually is when we are making our way through the middle, when it is easier to forget that we didn’t exist once and that we won’t exist again later,” he continues cheerfully. “I wanted it to be a picture with death as the frame.” For many years Spufford steadily worked away as one of the UK’s most respected nonfiction writers, with titles including I May Be Some Time, a cultural history of polar exploration; Backroom Boys, charting the overlooked achievements of British scientists; the “strangely noveloid” Red Plenty, about postwar Soviet economics; and Unapologetic, his lively apologia for religion and riposte to the “new atheism” of Richard Dawkins and co. If such an eclectic writer could be said to have a niche, it was to make nerdishness interesting. Then at 52 he published Golden Hill, a glittering take on the 18th-century novel, set in New York, which was the surprise hit of 2016, winning him a Costa first novel award and an enthusiastic new readership. Now Light Perpetual, which, after that explosive beginning, follows the lives (had they lived) of five Londoners from the second world war to 2009, looks set to be one of the stand-out novels of this year. What took him so long to come to fiction? “Cowardice,” he says simply. “I revere fiction writing and I didn’t want to do it badly. There is something uniquely self-exposing about fiction. Every bloody sentence, no matter how much in theory it is removed from you, is reflecting your sense of how human behaviour works.” As a tutor on Goldsmith’s creative writing MA, he spent years telling students that “they must dare to do the thing that they were frightened of, and confidently explaining what was wrong with the fiction they were writing,” he explains. “The internal contradiction just grew too painful and embarrassing.” While he learned a lot from his students – “thank you!” – he is relieved not to be in competition with them. “I’m not an uber-hip millennial,” the now 56-year-old author declares winningly, in his lockdown beard, cossack-style cap and woolly jumper (more jaunty Bolshevik than British boffin, two of his subjects). “Which is lucky because it means I’m not trying to stand in the same place as writers who have things to say based on direct observation about what it’s like being young now. Thank God!” Spufford is just back from taking the dog for his morning walk in the Cambridge countryside. We are talking, of course, on Zoom, with just a glimpse of his bookshelves in the background. But when he turns his computer towards the window the screen is filled with a postcard view of Ely cathedral. His wife Jessica Martin, a former Cambridge academic, is a canon of the cathedral, which has been shuttered up for longer in the past 12 months than at any time since the 17th century. He says he is longing for cafes to reopen (he does an impressive spluttering Gaggia impersonation) as he “can’t work if it is too quiet”; too much solitude and his thoughts “hide like mice under furniture when you turn the light on”. Anglican in his beliefs and catholic in his interests, Spufford talks with the free-wheeling, high-octane loquacity you’d expect from his books. “I like stuff. I like the complicated fractured broken-up difficult surface of the real world. I like things that resist being written about,” he says of his passion for nonfiction. “I’m interested in how the world works and what people do in it.” Fortunately, “there was a lot of stuff to be mastered” in writing Light Perpetual, a polyphonic novel that begins in the pots and pans section of a Woolworths in south London in 1944 and continues to take in the 60s music scene, working on the buses, fascism in the 70s, the Wapping dispute, the property boom and crash, and the rising cost of a cappuccino. Spufford brings the same vibrant attention to London in the postwar years as he did to pre-revolutionary New York in Golden Hill. Where that first novel saved the narrative pyrotechnics until the final pages, here he uses the whole box at the beginning: the German rocket blowing the fourth wall (and Woollies) apart, before painstakingly rebuilding it by telling the stories of Jo, Val, Alec, Vern and Ben with as much realism as possible. He was not interested in “metafictional pissing about” for the sake of it, but to get to some sort of emotional truth about “the dailyness of real lives”, he says. Light Perpetual recalls the inventiveness of Kate Atkinson’s wartime novel Life After Life and the social acuity of John Lanchester’s Capital. There are also borrowings from science fiction writers, in particular Ursula K Le Guin, and he still bears “the watermarks” of an early immersion in Italo Calvino and Angela Carter. As a “writer who happens to be a Christian”, as he puts it, he always writes “with the ghost of CS Lewis on one shoulder” (he recently finished a sequel to the Chronicles of Narnia, which can’t be published for copyright reasons. But the ghost who had the greatest influence on this novel, rather less loftily, is James Fox, co-author of Rolling Stone Keith Richards’s autobiography, Life. Richards gives the novel one of its epigraphs: “Everything was available in Sidcup”, referring, Spufford points out, to its record library not to drugs. Music plays throughout the new novel, partly because of its preoccupation with time, “from whole lifetimes to phases of a life, all the way down to the four intensely structured minutes of a song”, he explains. But also just because he loves it: “It is the pervasive art of our times. It’s the thing which you don’t have to be posh to be either receiving or making.” Just as you can’t write about London without writing about music, so you can’t shy away from politics or race: “Thinking politically is part of thinking about the great big collective human ant hill that is a city,” he says. “Of how the people get along with each other within the ant hill and how the politics of the different decades change the ant hill.” There’s no mistaking that his sympathies lie more with socialist (smart) Alec than Thatcherite Vern (redeemed only by his love of opera, of which Spufford isn’t a fan). The author is particularly proud “to lay claim to have written the second British novel in which plastering plays a major role” and, in so doing, surely also the first to include a joke about The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists. “Just to be clear,” he says, leaning into the screen for emphasis. “I’m a middle-class socialist, I always have been a middle-class socialist.” (Red Plenty, his most overtly political book, has earned him a readership among rightwing libertarians in the US “as the one book you need to read to see the evil of socialism,” he reports gleefully. “I love my frothing rightwing American readers.”) Just as he didn’t want to push any political message, trying to hold back on his own views as much as possible – “but I know that they are leaking in” – he is at pains to “scuff back off” the “beautifully realised period glow” of historical fiction. He doesn’t want the reader to think “it is 1979 – it must be Thatcher. People don’t think ‘here I am living in History’, people think ‘Ah, it’s Wednesday’.” As for his own history, Spufford spent his rather “melancholy” 20s and early 30s as a freelance writer in south London – Brixton Hill, Denmark Hill, Peckham – “storing away the hills and trees and fried chicken shops” for what would become Light Perpetual. Although he was born 20 years after the novel begins, “the trashing of various public things I cared about a lot has been one of the major features of my experience of my own times,” he says. “And yes, I’m still angry about some of what has been done to the city of London and the larger country.” He grew up in the Midlands, his parents both history professors (his mother in social history, his father in economics) at the University of Keele. “Intelligent wallflowers”, they were so unbothered by popular culture they didn’t know who Elvis Presley was. But they unwittingly provided a progressive example, taking it in turns to write books and his father doing all the cooking. “They were each other’s best collaborators”. Theirs was not so much an ivory tower as a 1960s concrete one: but just outside the campus on which they lived, Keele woods began, Spufford’s very own Hundred Acre Wood leading to Middle-earth as his reading grew. In his 2002 memoir The Child That Books Built Spufford sees his obsessive withdrawal into fiction as an escape from the painful reality of a childhood shadowed by the rare genetic disease from which his younger sister Bridget suffered. “Still, when I reach for a book, I am reaching for an equilibrium. I am reading to banish pity, and brittle bones. I am reading to evade guilt and avoid consequences,” he writes. “I think being next to somebody else’s tragedy is a very angry-making thing,” he says now. When it was discovered that he spent every school break-time pacing round the playground on his own, his parents sent him to a choir school, which was “slightly traumatic” but where he found his role as the clever kid: “I could be Brains in Thunderbirds, I could be Q in Live and Let Die.” It is no coincidence, he believes, that he started writing seriously in 1989, the year his sister died, aged 22. “I suspect that there is an uncomfortable truth there,” he reflects. “About being freed into writing by it becoming a past-tense sorrow rather than an active and dominating present-tense sorrow.” He met his wife at Cambridge, in what was otherwise a largely “shy miserable time” (there’s a theme) at university. Although they didn’t marry until many years and several breakups later. A personal crisis – triggered by what in Unapologetic Spufford calls the Human Propensity to Fuck Up (sin for short) – led him to rediscover the faith that he had abandoned as a teenager. If the book is “extremely careful” not to spell out his misdemeanour he’s not telling now: “Just the usual kind of human male heterosexual fuck up,” he says. His “sense of guilt” is the point, “not what I was guilty of”. He was forgiven: “Mercy turned out to be available,” and not only his marriage but his belief was restored. “Christianity seemed to me to pass the test of being true to the grimy, partly glorious, partly awful, nature of experience.” This idea of redemption is central to the novel. “Mercy is the most important thing there is. And not to be taken for granted,” he says. “Sorry, now I’m becoming pious.” Goodness, like happiness, is “a tough proposition” for a novelist. “A gaze that wants to look for goodness, is also a gaze that needs to register the really ugly stuff. Goodness makes sense because cruelty exists.” The rocket is not there at the beginning just as a metal memento mori or to perform narrative tricks with fate and time. “The background is supposed to be eternity as well as death,” he explains. “It’s either a black frame or a very blazingly white frame around this particular picture.” He is “watching the world begun anew” for his 15-year-old daughter. Many of the things he has cared about deeply have been lost or “carelessly damaged” in his lifetime: “the idea of a public good, the eco-system, the NHS, public bloody libraries”, he says with feeling. “Basically things to do with trust. Things to do with public goods that don’t profit anybody. That stuff has been systematically looted, vandalised, asset-stripped and neglected for most of my adult life.” Yet despite this “extraordinary mess”, he can’t do without hope. “I think that redemption is always an option,” he says. “Light will continue to shine in darkness in various ways,” which sounds rather like the title of a novel.