So pleased to see Philip Hensher’s rave review of Francis Spufford’s Nonesuch. I had the privilege of reading Nonesuch during the process of composition, and let me tell you, it’s everything Hensher says it is. What a book.
See also Andrew Motion’s review in the TLS: “These themes converge on a similar point. They all concern the possibility of transfiguration – the likelihood that apparently stable forms, stable feelings and stable concepts, including everything from love to money to time itself, are less predictable than people like to think. Is this Francis Spufford’s way of arguing the merits of unprovable faith in non-human interventions (he has written a book about his own Christianity) while also entertaining his readers with a jolly romp? Possibly. In all events, the distinction of his book is that it conveys by all manner of means the pleasures of finding the unexpected within the predictable.”