Francis Spufford, SFI’s newest Miller Scholar, is a prolific author whose writing often straddles the line between fiction and nonfiction. His history Red Plenty incorporates fictitious narrative, and novels like Cahokia Jazz are so deeply researched that they amount to counterfactual historical theses. His new novel, Nonesuch, published March 10, is no exception; in this historical, fantasy thriller, the fate of the world rests on one woman’s ability to interpret and manipulate complex systems as she navigates the interrelationships between politics, economics, WWII, and magic.
As Britain declares war against Germany, Iris Hawkins balances her duties as a financial secretary in a brokerage firm — a position she hopes to leverage into personal wealth — with her duty to humankind: she’s been drafted by angels into an occult war against the British Union of Fascists, who are poised to activate London’s secret network of divine power to alter time to engineer Hitler’s triumph.
The angels Iris encounters are, by turns, biblically correct amalgamations of wings, comic-book characters, animated collections of rubbish and typewriter ribbon, and, often, tessellating streams of luminescent data. The angel who warns Iris of the fascist plot can’t quite decide on the right terms to explain the physics of it all: somehow through the triangulation of voluminous ether, quantum tunneling, and black magic, Iris can — and must — reach “Nonesuch Place,” where time itself is malleable and the past can be changed, before the fascists exploit it to their own ends.
Fortunately, Iris is good at evaluating systems. Underutilized and unnoticed in her day job at the brokerage firm, she discerns patterns in the wartime stock market that allow her to square humanistic and patriotic duty with her own ambitions for self-sufficiency, entering into a lucrative and very noble financial conspiracy with her boss. She is also romantically entangled with a brilliant and shy signals operator, Geoff, who helps her navigate an unindexed storeroom of occult paperwork to support her nightly anti-fascist crusade. His technical knowledge of waves and signals, developed in his work with the nascent BBC television broadcasts, is in high demand for building Britain’s early RADAR systems and is equally indispensable to Iris’s metaphysical war, as the angels are made of energy and signals themselves.
In his previous novels, Spufford’s fascination with the complexity of cities is used to bring readers into vibrant settings like the speculative eponymous Indigenous metropolis of Cahokia Jazz and the historical embryonic New York City of Golden Hill. The London of Nonesuch is equally complex and warped, not only by the magical interrelationships of angel-possessing statues, but in the mundane and increasingly common rigors of industrial cities bombarded from the air: blackouts, rations, shockwaves, fires, deaths.
Iris’s worldliness and curiosity are her keys to saving Britain. Undaunted by the need to decipher the occult writings overcrowding her boyfriend’s attic, or the declining markets on the teletype, Iris takes stock of what is in front of her, making and testing bold hypotheses about the war economy and London’s network of statuary angels, with little regard for her own safety or reputation. She has no problem jumping from a roof to an invisible bridge, or cornering John Maynard Keynes at a dinner to interrogate her financial theories. She’s the sort of person who would probably have a pretty good time at SFI.
More
- "A serious tall tale," Times Literary Supplement (February 6, 2026)
- "Myth, monsters and making sense of a disenchanted world: why everyone is reading fantasy," by Francis Spufford, The Guardian (February 22, 2026)
- "Nonesuch by Francis Spufford review – a dazzling wartime fantasy," The Guardian (February 24, 2026)