«Spafford makes his characters resonate with the everyday miracle of what it means to be a human being touched by both evil and good». — The Spectator Saturday, 1944. A shop in south-east London receives a shipment of aluminum frying pans. A crowd gathers to see the first metal cookware in many years — after all, everything had been melted down for military needs. Moments later, the crowd is gone. A German bomb hits the stall directly. Among the shoppers were five small children — Alex, Vern, Val, Ben, and Joe. Who are they? What future have they lost? This brilliantly constructed novel about what «could have been» had each of them lived their lives in a vibrant London in the 60s, 80s, and 90s of the twentieth century. Their everyday dramas as sons and daughters, spouses, parents, grandparents. Who would have become a conductor or a landlord, a con artist, a teacher, or an inmate? «Come forth, another future. Come forth, mercy, manifested too late. Come forth, knowledge, gained too late. Come forth, other possibilities. Come forth, undisturbed depths. Come forth, undivided light».
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