Francis Spufford

And then I've used the kind of the ambiguous power of fiction to bring them back for a sort of, a sort of resurrection so that,

we do see them living the lives they might have had onwards through the decades of the 20th and early 21st century.

So these five do get to see the astonishing changes that London went through, and they do get to have the equally overwhelming changes that happened to London working-class lives in that period of time.

But it's only the kind of semi-real magic wand of fiction I can wave.

And as the arc of the book comes down towards the end, I hope that the reverberations of the explosion are heard again and you can feel death and loss coming nearer again.

But of course, that's what happens in everybody's life.

We tend to forget very comfortably and easily about death when we're in the middle.

And then as we get to the end, however long or short it is, we start to notice that the walls are kind of thin and there's an awful lot of dark or possibly light on the outside of them.

This is a very good question.

And there are some people who are reading this book who are going, don't get it.

If you're going to give their lives back anyway, why bother to take them away in the first place?

But what I wanted was something that kind of pushed into the foreground of your mind a kind of attention to all of the kind of voids of non-existence which are just around and behind the living and being we do do.

I wanted something where people

where you had to be aware of the possibility of life's alternative nearby, so that it was always a picture with a frame of death, or possibly of eternity, of kind of a dark or a light frame.

Because I wanted the reader to notice all the way through that life is fragile and precious and not to be taken for granted.

I wanted to look more arbitrary and gratuitous and

consequently glorious in some ways than it usually does.

I wanted the kind of fragility of life to be something you could feel, you could kind of rub between your finger and thumb as you were reading.

I think there are several different traditions kind of converging on it.

And one of them is the kind of