Francis Spufford Books in Order

Edited by Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow, this essay collection examines exchanges between technology and culture. Writers from science and the humanities explore invention, historical imagination, and the influence of machines on artistic and intellectual life.

Francis Spufford investigates Britain's fascination with polar exploration, tracing connections between literature, national identity, and hazardous journeys into icy landscapes. Captain Scott's final expedition becomes part of a wider cultural history of imagined wilderness.

Francis Spufford revisits the books that shaped his childhood and his understanding of the world. Combining memoir with reflection on children's literature, he examines why stories matter to young readers and how reading forms the imagination.

Beginning with Britain's abandoned space program, Francis Spufford follows engineers and technologists through changing national fortunes. Accounts of aircraft, computer games, mobile phones, genetics, and planetary exploration examine technical ingenuity and ambitious projects achieved with limited resources.

Blending history and fiction, Francis Spufford explores Soviet hopes for economic abundance in the late 1950s and 1960s. Scientists, planners, and ordinary citizens struggle to turn the promised prosperity of a centrally planned economy into reality.

Francis Spufford offers a personal account of why Christianity remains emotionally meaningful to him. Exploring ordinary experiences of failure, guilt, hope, and forgiveness, he challenges dismissive views of belief without claiming to prove religious doctrine.

A mysterious young Englishman arrives in New York in 1746 carrying an order for a thousand pounds. His refusal to explain his purpose unsettles the city's merchants and draws him into romance, suspicion, and danger.

These essays explore how imagination shapes nonfiction, novels, and religious belief. Encounters with places, writers, and books lead Spufford through questions of factual truth and invented worlds, from medieval legends to the claims of faith.

Five children die in a London bombing in 1944, but this novel imagines the lives they might have lived. Their alternative futures unfold through decades of work, relationships, loss, and change in the postwar city.

In an alternate 1920s America, detective Joe Barrow investigates a body discovered atop a skyscraper in thriving Indigenous Cahokia. The killing threatens the city's fragile coexistence, exposing secrets that could remake or destroy its diverse society.

As war approaches London, secretary Iris Hawkins meets a television engineer and becomes entangled in an occult conflict. Amid the Blitz, she must stop a time-traveling fascist whose plans threaten to alter history itself.