What if the outcome of the Second World War was not only fought in the skies over London, but contested in secret – through hidden forces capable of bending time itself? That is the provocative premise of Nonesuch, the latest novel by Francis Spufford, a writer who has made a career out of exploring the fragile boundary between history as we know it and history as it might have been

Set during the Blitz, the novel begins in a vividly realised world of blackout curtains, office routines, and quiet, grinding anxiety. But this isn’t simply historical fiction. Spufford quickly opens a second dimension beneath wartime London: one of occult networks, imprisoned angels, and competing visions of the future. At the centre of it all is Iris Hawkins – a young woman determined not just to endure the war, but to expand her place within it

From the outset, Nonesuch makes clear what kind of novel it is: not a nostalgic recreation of the past, but a bold reimagining of it, where the stakes are nothing less than the direction of history itself

Iris works in a stockbroking firm in the City, but she isn’t content merely to type other people’s money into existence. She wants access to power: financial, social, erotic, imaginative. That makes her a very Spuffordian protagonist. Like  his previous novels, Golden Hill, Light Perpetual and Cahokia Jazz, Nonesuch is fascinated by alternative possibilities: the lives that might be lived, the histories that might have happened, the worlds hiding just under the surface of the known one

The plot soon swerves into the marvellous. Iris becomes involved with Geoff, a young BBC engineer involved in top-secret radar work, and is drawn into a supernatural conspiracy involving angels trapped in statues, occult organisations, British fascists, and a magical place called Nonesuch, where time itself may be bent

That mixture could sound absurd  –  and in some ways it is, albeit proudly. What saves the book from mere whimsy is Iris. She isn’t simply swept into adventure; she presses toward it. Spufford has said the story concerns “a ruthlessly self-reliant young woman” trying to stop magical fascists from changing the course of the war, while also coping with the inconvenience of falling in love. That phrase matters: Iris isn’t the passive beloved of a fantasy plot, but its engine

The wartime setting also gives Nonesuch a richer historical charge. The Second World War temporarily unsettled British gender roles: women entered new forms of work, movement and autonomy, even if much of that freedom was later withdrawn. Spufford appears interested in that moment of loosened possibility  –  when a young woman like Iris might glimpse a larger life before the old social structures reassert themselves.

The fantasy element, meanwhile,  isn’t decorative. Fascism isn’t only political but metaphysical: a desire to control history, purify it, redirect it, make it obey. In contrast, Iris represents appetite, improvisation, curiosity, and human messiness. The battle over time becomes a battle over whether the future should remain open

Spufford’s prose is, as ever, one of the main pleasures. He has a gift for making historical worlds feel sensuous and immediate: not museum-piece pasts, but living environments of noise, weather, hunger, lust, fear and jokes. The Blitz isn’t treated only as noble endurance; it is also exhausting, frightening, inconvenient and strange

For readers who loved Light Perpetual, there is a family resemblance: once again Spufford is drawn to wartime London and to the question of lives interrupted or rerouted. But Nonesuch is more exuberant, more openly genre-loving. Its ingredients include C. S. Lewis, Philip Pullman, occult adventure, romance, filmic momentum and comic boldness

The result is a novel about possibility: personal, historical and supernatural. Iris wants a different life; Britain faces a different possible future; the plot itself imagines that history may be vulnerable to interference. That makes Nonesuch both escapist and serious. It gives us angels and time-machines, but its real subject is freedom. In short, it’s Spufford in full imaginative flight: learned, playful, generous, strange and emotionally alive. Above all, it gives us Iris Hawkins  –  ambitious, bodily, clever, impatient  –  as a heroine fit for a world in flames.

In the end, the novel feels less like a closed story than the opening movement of something larger  – fitting, given that Spufford has already planned a continuation in Arcady. While the novel offers a satisfying emotional arc  – anchored in Iris’s restless intelligence and determination  – it deliberately leaves the wider conflict unresolved, hinting at deeper struggles over time, power, and the shape of the future yet to come. That sense of expansion is part of its appeal: Spufford invites us not just to witness a wartime fantasy, but to step into a world whose possibilities are still unfolding. If Nonesuch is about seizing agency in a moment of crisis, then the promise of Arcady suggests that the real battle  – for history itself  – is only just beginning