A thread: in a novel, you can look through anyone’s eyes. A daughter reluctantly taking on her father’s crime syndicate. Or a former wrestler on the trail of a taxidermied salamander. 1/7

What about a man in a house on the edge of a wood, who may or may not be haunted by the girl he may not not have abducted? Or a young photographer in love with someone you shouldn’t in contemporary London? 2/7

Or denizens of seedy old Soho trying to rescue it from redevelopment? Or a social media star dealing with a family crisis? 3/7

Perhaps someone in the middle of a messy life who gets involved with an older couple’s open relationship? Or perhaps the girl secretly inhabiting a house in Louisiana without the occupants’ knowledge? 4/7

You could enter the world of a Ghanaian neuroscientist, trying to unpick depression and understand her family’s turbulent changes. Or that of the teenager whose parents have built an ark for oncoming ecological disaster. 5/7

Visit post-apocalyptic Margate, where two young woman fall in love for the first time. Or the days following Kristallnacht, when a German-Jewish man tries desperately to get out of the country. 6/7

This thread could go on and on, but let’s end it with Francis Spufford’s new novel. A a meditation on life, lives and loss: after their deaths in a bomb blast in the Blitz, we see the lives his characters might have lived. A tribute to the power and possibility of the novel.