Nonesuch, forthcoming in 2026, is a spiritual thriller set in wartime London. The story involves angels, ambition, time travel, and an aristocratic fascist villain named Lall—most of which appear peripherally in the following excerpt, taken from near the end of the book.
THE SHOPS NO LONGER had turkeys in them, or oranges, but she returned from Sussex with a bag of chestnuts and a recently executed chicken from the farm next door. Geoff devised a chestnut stuffing, and at ten o’clock at night on Christmas Eve, they were sitting in the gradually deepening smell of the chicken roasting, so that it would be ready with minimum fuss for lunch the next day. There were four wrapped parcels under the one-sprig tree, two from her to him and two from him to her. (She had added to the technical pens a scientific children’s book, bought rather at random, called My Friend Mr. Leakey. It was by a famous biologist Geoff had mentioned.)
The flowerpot on the floor, the green pine needles with the silver balls nestling among them, were a total mismatch with the look of the flat. Rustic. Naïve. Untidy. The needles were already shedding onto the carpet. But looking at the colored paper, smelling the pine smell and the cooking smell, aware of the cold night outside during which the radio said snow was possible, Iris felt the enchantment of childhood Christmases somehow stealing back. There were no colored fairy lights or paper chains looped from the curtain rail, but for the first time in she didn’t know how many years, there was the old sense of expectancy. Something wonderful was coming. Some enormous happiness was suddenly imminent. It almost hurt. A transportation to the beginning of things, everything ahead, everything possible, the great mistakes not made. Might it really be possible to get that back? Experience said not. Everything irreversible ever endured said not. But it was almost Christmas, with snow in the air, and she was sitting on Geoff’s lap with her head tucked into his shoulder. She looked at the tree. He looked at her looking.
“What did you and your dad do for Christmas?” she asked.
“Oh, he was opposed to it, theoretically. The closer it got, the more he went on about Yule and the winter solstice. ‘The pagan roots of the festival.’ I think he was fending off the memories of when he and my mother were very young and he was a curate. He never managed to buy me a present—”
“I’ve got you a present.”
“I can see it. Them. But all the same, every year we ended up going to the midnight service in Hampstead. We’d creep in at the back, and he’d cry during the carols. Every time. I was mortified. But I was glad we went.”
She pictured them, the stoic little boy, not very clean, and Mr. Hale, histrionic in his cloak.
“And what about you?” he asked. She had known she was inviting the return question, hadn’t she?
“Oh, aunts and uncles and cousins. A full house. Very noisy. And lots of food. My mother cooked like she was feeding an army. She would have this whole…gastronomic plan of campaign. Days of preparations.” She could smell them as she thought of them, the waves of savory and sweet perfumes that rolled out of the kitchen in Watford. (The first kitchen. The original kitchen. The kitchen of the time before.) Nutmeg and spice and brandy, gravy and sausage meat and candied fruit.
“And you chopping away? Helping?”
“Heavens, no. No, no, no, no. I wasn’t allowed to touch a spoon, even. The kitchen was her kingdom, not for sharing. Until…well.” She clammed up. She could feel it, a physical impediment, her mouth closing by itself on the prospect of talking aloud any further into that past.
“Iris,” said Geoff.
“What?”
“You know you don’t talk about your family, ever? This is literally the first time. I don’t know anything about them. I don’t know their names. I don’t know if you’ve got brothers and sisters.”
“No, I don’t,” she said, more sharply than she meant.
“Your parents, then. Will I be…meeting them at some point?”
It was the most ordinary of questions. You agreed to marry someone; you took them round to Mum and Dad. You hoped that everyone would get along. You hoped that your boy—your man, your slightly odd but kind and marvelous and brilliant man—would get enfolded, brought in with raised glasses and cheers, particularly if he was parentless himself and in need of everyday warmth. And her dad would do that. Of course he would. He would take to Geoff instantly. But. But, but, but.
“It’s difficult,” she said eventually.
“I can see that,” said Geoff patiently. “Could you tell me why?”
“Something went wrong.”
“Yes?”
“Something big. The kind of thing that’s too big to forgive.”
“You can’t forgive them?”
“No! The other way round.”
“Iris. Iris. I know you—”
“You don’t know this.”
“Won’t you tell me, then?”
She studied him, from very close to. Ear and cheek and eye and warm skin. There was no judgment in his face, no expectation of judgment. He trusted her. Was the price of love that she had to trust him back? She supposed it might be. It sounded right, but then it also sounded—love, trust, love, trust—as if it ought to be easy, when actually it meant tearing through the scar tissue that sealed a box of memory. “I will,” she said. “I promise I will tell you. I will explain. But not now. Not at Christmas.” Tearing through tissue into old sorrow, tearing across this moment, this night, this surety arrived at, this serene smell of food cooking. “Please?” she said.
“Of course,” he said. “Whenever you like. You know what? I’d like to give you one of my presents now.”
“Are you sure? Shouldn’t it be tomorrow morning?”
“I’m sure.”
He tipped her gently off his lap and knelt down to fetch a little square box wrapped in red paper. She opened it and it was, of course, a ring: an old-fashioned Victorian engagement ring, with a central sapphire and brilliants around it.
“Will you—”
“You know I will,” she said, and he put it on her. She turned it in the light. Serious, not a bauble. To be worn forever. I thought I’d be afraid of this, she thought, but I’m not, I’m not.
“It’s beautiful,” she said.
“I’m afraid it comes from a junk shop in the Edgeware Road. I tried lots of proper jewelers, but nothing was quite right.”
The whole city, she thought, giving each other old things instead of new ones. I hope the woman who had it before me was happy.
“It’s beautiful,” she repeated.
“Good.” He took her hands and stood up, pulling her with him. “Now then. I’ll turn the oven off, and we can go.”
“Go?”
“To the midnight service, up the road.”
“You want to go to church?”
“Yes. With you.”
They weren’t the only ones. Snow had not begun yet, but the air had the smell of it, the chill intoxicating null smell of the clouds above, dense with soft crystals nearly ready to fall, and along the dark streets toward the river, the silhouettes of other Chelsea-ites were in motion, all tugged along in the same direction. They had passed the Malayan rubber farmer in the foyer, wrapping a scarf around his neck and puffing his pipe. The woman from the basement shelter with a laugh like a horse was somewhere behind them, laughing like a horse, but hers was the only loud voice. Otherwise, the night was hushed, with the hush of the imminent snow. Swathed by it, swaddled by it, protected by it—at least, that was what it felt like—from the murder noises of the wartime night. The sirens had not sounded. If they did, Iris was not sure what they would do. Run for home? Hope for a deep crypt to shelter in, in the church? But they had not sounded yet, and perhaps they would not, at Christmas. Perhaps the Luftwaffe crews at the airfields in northern France were drinking glühwein and singing “Silent Night” instead. Perhaps.
The Old Church, on the Thames embankment, couldn’t welcome people with a blaze of lights in its porch because of the blackout regulations. Tiny slits of brightness had to guide the way. And then there was a confusion of blackness between the two sets of doors, outer and inner, filled with murmuring and stamping feet. But on the inside, the church was alight with candles, burning in heedless banks with flames the color of daffodil and topaz, blue-hearted like the stone on her ring. She had never been in before, and it was a surprise. The outside of the Old Church was sturdily Georgian, a respectable barn of a place with wide brick arches, but inside was old. Old and strange. They were under an ancient vault shaped like a barrel and flickering with shadows on its whitewashed walls. Above, a row of curved skylights pierced upward through the thickness of the stone, blocked with blackout fabric now but still punctuating the white roof with dark shafts. It was as if they were all gathering within the tube of a musical instrument, in a flute, say, and looking up at its finger-holes, waiting to see what would be played on it.
All around, crammed in in coats and mufflers, were denizens of the Chelsea streets. The grand ones, who by day she might have taken primarily as a challenge to her vowels: the old ladies in jewels, the aged military men with thread-veins bursting on their cheeks like poppies in a wheat crop, the platinum-rinsed younger ones who bought the clever little tins to make canapés, the men on leave for Christmas in ten different kinds of officer’s uniform, the old bohemians with shaggy hair who these days had symphony orchestras and academies of art and newspaper columns at their disposal. But also the shopkeepers, the shop assistants, the housekeepers, the cleaners, and some of their sons home for Christmas in much less flattering battle dress. (Geoff was in civvies.) And the careful nondescripts too, female and middle-aged male, from whose good clothes you could tell nothing about the places from which they were rising: the chancers, in short, like herself. And a bunch of railway workers over the bridge from Battersea who had come to this midnight appointment straight from the pub.
Kinds of people not usually crowded together, but commonly marked now, if you looked closely in the candlelight, with the strains of the last months. Shadows under most of the eyes, nervous twitches widely distributed, the retired general with skin as gray and rough with fatigue as the meat porter’s. The common flesh declared itself, and for once the different clothes looked more like costumes, all of them looser and worse fitting than they had been before, picked arbitrarily off the rack and flung to the first person who caught them. Who’ll be the general tonight? Who’ll be the dustman? Who’ll be the duchess? Who’ll be the draper? Pull on your glad rags for the social game. It had such real stakes, of course, even now with random and democratic death falling from the sky. The number you drew dictated whether you saw out the raids in the basement of the Ritz or in a piss-swilled public shelter. That was why she meant to pass her life in the Ritz, if she could. But here and now, there seemed to be a kind of truce on offer, in the pews, a chance, just for a moment, to see through the game and put aside her own chameleon campaign within it and look with eyes temporarily wiped of class and status and aspiration at what the candlelight disclosed. Smiles between strangers, an awkward goodwill. A speculative suspicion, traveling from eye to eye, that there might be some other way altogether, some essential and uncostumed way, of seeing these rivalrous animals you stood among, this rivalrous animal you were yourself. Some other thing they all were, or might be, if you could but know it.
And then the choir came in, and they all began to sing.
In the bleak midwinter
Frosty wind made moan
Earth stood hard as iron
Water like a stone.
Chelsea Old Church could only muster two or three boy choristers for the midnight service of 1940—the rest must all have been evacuated—but some of the young officers home for Christmas were musical and had put on surplices, the genteel ladies who taught harp and piano off the King’s Road had come to sing alto and soprano, and there were advantages to living where opera singers did. At the back of the scratch choir, a leonine bass came processing, rumbling out the bottom line. Ah, that was the tune the stone flute was to play. Topaz light and daffodil light on singing faces, the blue bead-points of the wicks. Iris knew the words without even having to try. Childhood supplied them; they came up to her mouth and out into the candleshine from deep time.
What can I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb.
If I were a wise man, I would do my part;
Yet what can I give Him: give my heart.
Tears ran down her cheeks, and she didn’t try to scrub them away. Geoff squeezed her hand. She looked to see if he was mortified, and he was not. But why am I crying? she thought. It wasn’t the old story of the baby in the manger, not directly, anyway. Nor was it babies in general. Her friend Eleanor was pregnant, she wasn’t, and had no plans to be for a good long time, if ever. It was something about a new thing beginning in a bad time, in a hard winter. A tender thing, a delicate thing, just come into the world and as little able to protect itself as a newborn with a bubble of milk on its lips.
None of this is protection, she thought, and went on thinking it as the vicar read the lesson about the shepherds watching their flocks in the fields. The robes on the vicar and the choir, the midnight-best outfits of the posh congregation and the less posh congregation—all of it would rip and burn or, if it lasted through the war, would fade and tatter, undone by time as thoroughly in the end as it would have been by blast or flames. The barrel walls of the church themselves, that seemed so solid, would shatter at a direct hit like anything else. “Peace on earth, goodwill toward men,” said the vicar. They were putting their faith, Iris and Geoff and everyone else there, in promises they didn’t know could be kept. Promises with no guarantee of safety, or of happy endings, any more than there was a happy ending for the baby in the manger. And yet they were trying to trust them anyway. Iris thought of the way the whole of the Mariner Building had quaked under her, hesitating between liquid and solid. We’re breakable, and our walls might as well be made of glass. Anything might happen. Moment to moment, anything at all. But by now, she thought, glancing at the faces, everyone here knew that. This was hope, not delusion.
It came upon a midnight clear, that glorious song of old,
Of angels bending near the earth to touch their harps of gold.
They were singing the walls up; that was what they were doing. They were making a shelter with their voices, by candlelight, in which vulnerable things, innocent things, new things, could at least be hoped for. No guarantees. One bomb would smash the canopy of voices as it would smash the roof. But if the walls were only a solidification of hope anyway, and mortared stones were no stronger than hope, then hope was no less strong than mortared stones. And thinking about this, singing and holding Geoff’s hand, Iris felt her attention pass out through the walls of the Old Church as if they really were transparent like glass as well as weak like glass. Out into the London night, where the snow had started falling, sifting slow and almost weightless down, a windless tumble of flakes through the blackout. It was cold outside. The waters of the Thames were iron dark, welling and wrinkling as the tide turned, and they ate each snowflake that fell in them as if it had never been. On the bomb sites, the Christmas snow was streaking and furring the ground, settling on mangled metal and broken bricks, touching with white lines the lintels that no longer had a doorway below them, girders that now projected into empty space. It was settling on the hole in Hampstead where Mr. Hale had died. But also on all the intact roofs that sheltered the living, the grand ones and the small ones and the middling ones alike. Snow falling on tiles and slates, domes and steeples, snow falling on Soho and Belgravia, Stepney and Mile End, the Kinesis Club and Mrs. Tilly’s boarding house in Clapham and the Alexandra Palace transmitter mast. Snow falling on the lovers, snow falling on the haters, snow falling on those who were both. Snow falling on the roof under which, she hoped, Lall might just possibly be lying after all in her Harriet’s arms, a psychopath at rest.
All under a sky of driving flake. And among those flakes, she supposed, threading and wavering and twisting and rushing in their soda-water swarms, the other pale particles that made up the bodies of the angels. Indifferent to the cold, unsplittable, unwoundable, alive among the invisible vibrations of the radio waves. For this sky was full of angels too, wasn’t it? She had reason to know it was. For the first time, she put together the Christmas angels in the story with the creatures of the air she had met, with the white lights filling her vision with phosphorescence, with the blue rift into impossibility in the corner of the bedroom. Was it them in the Christmas story? If it was, no wonder the shepherds had to be told not to be afraid. If it was, then the sky over Bethlehem must have suddenly yawned into blue pits and vortices; if it was, then it had been swirls of intolerable strangeness that had declared peace on earth, goodwill toward men. Had sung it, chanted it, in voices like chiming glassware and hollow tubes vibrated by arctic wind. Voices that might be declaring it now, out there in the cold, in and above the snow clouds, in the temporary peace of a Christmas night without bombers, from a sky as strange as the one over Bethlehem.
Copyright © 2026 by Francis Spufford. Originally published in Great Britain in 2026 by Faber & Faber Limited. From the forthcoming book Nonesuch: A Novel by Francis Spufford to be published by Scribner, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC. Printed by permission.
Francis Spufford is a British author who likes to write books other people haven’t seen the possibility of. His previous novels include Golden Hill and Cahokia Jazz (both from Scribner), and Red Plenty (Graywolf). His newest, Nonesuch, will be published by Scribner in March 2026.
Photo by Phil Hearing on Unsplash
