Novel of the week: Angels in the Blitz

05 March 2026, The Tablet

Spufford plunges into his fantasy world with relish. “Angels weren’t flesh and blood, they were wave and particle.”

For anyone suffering from the doom-laden news cycle, rescue is at hand. In a world filled with genre fiction, it’s rare to come across a novel that effortlessly leaps boundaries in a blaze of originality, but Francis Spufford’s Nonesuch does just that. It takes the stuff of London’s Blitz and infuses it with angels and mystery monsters to create an audacious historical fantasy.

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