Francis Spufford's Blog

... is a literary fantasy, set during the London Blitz, featuring wartime finance, angels, magical fascists and very early television. The American edition will be published by Scribner on 10 March 2026, and the cover looks like this:



The cover for the British edition, published by Faber two weeks earlier, hasn't been released yet.

For the first time ever, I have written a book that requires a sequel, so NONESUCH will be followed by ARCADY the year after.

Just a quick note to say that Scribner's softcover edition of Cahokia Jazz is published today. Price a very reasonable $20 – not bad for a whole fully-specified timeline. But in case you don't fancy paying it, I draw your attention to the giveaway happening *right now* on this very site.

Out today (4 April) from Faber, with a beautiful golden cover in line with the strangely gold-dominant design of both my previous two novels.

That is all. Just the facts, ma'am.

Deeply perceptive review in Locus magazine by the SF critic Niall Harrison, taking the science-fictionality of Cahokia Jazz as a given, and then working its way onward from there to examine what the book does with the genre:

'Ultimately Cahokia Jazz is most notable for the thought that's gone into its thought-experiment. It demands the reader's trust and faith as it unpacks its characters, plot, and ideas, and it invites debate about its choices.'

I'm not quite sure why -- maybe it's an attack of New Year madness -- but Cahokia Jazz is now priced at 99p on Kindle in the UK. Just saying.

This first appeared in the 7 December issue of the British Catholic weekly The Tablet.


Ages ago, the New Statesman ran a writing competition, for an excerpt from a historical novel written in the future which would get the present day laughably, disastrously wrong. The wining entry, if I remember rightly, was set in “Oxford College, Cambridge” and featured a don in a doublet and ruff looking at the ‘row of battered Penguins’ on his shelf – then, ripping the wrapper off one of them, and sinking his teeth into the chocolate.

This don/don and Penguin/Penguin confusion has been on my mind lately, because the novel I’ve just published has required me to invent a form of 1920s Catholicism which, ideally, needs to strike actual Catholics as not ridiculous. And not unrecognisable either, despite belonging to a slightly different history of the world than the one we actually inhabit. In one way, of course, this is simply the problem any writer faces who sets out to represent any of the large number of things that they, individually, are not. But this particular challenge to imagination has mattered more to me, and been more anxious, than the general run of them. I’m not a Catholic, except in the small ‘c’ sense in which all credal Christians are, signed up to the one holy, catholic and apostolic church and trusting to the Holy Spirit to furnish an invisible unity beneath the visible divisions. But I’m not remote from Catholicism either. Half my family are Catholics. I sit as a Trustee on the board of a small Catholic charity. I’m a nearby outsider, an intimate sort of outsider. Therefore, it strikes me, the kind of person from whom mistakes or misapprehensions would matter more, be more embarrassing.

Did I make my life harder or easier by having the Catholicism of the novel be a syncretistic kind? I’m not sure. In the world of my novel Cahokia Jazz, the dense populations of Native American farmers in the Mississippi valley didn’t die of Old World diseases, and were still there to be converted by ingenious Jesuits. Since this didn’t really happen, I was free in one sense to create according to taste my fusion between Ignatian spirituality and leftover pieces of sun-worship. But syncretism actually exists. It has cultural rules, repeating patterns. I had a set of emblems of real syncretism to be faithful to: the slightly awkward oil paintings in Cuzco, for instance, created by a first generation of Inca artists under Dominican tutelage, where in the absence of bread as a familiar food Christ is shown breaking a roasted guinea-pig at the Last Supper. Or the artful re-presentation of Christianity in Confucian terms, by Jesuits in China. I wanted to produce, not one of the syncretisms at the fringe of Catholicism, like Haitian Vodoun, where Catholic costumes dress a West African pantheon, but something firmly within the Church Universal. Not a corruption or a contamination, but a successful localisation, of the kind that has been necessary everywhere – including Europe, during its own conversion in late antiquity – for the church of every place to exist in this particular place, between that familiar hill and these familiar trees.

The large idea, in the novel, was to show the arbitariness of the racial history of the United States as we know it, by giving the country another one, where Catholicism displaced whiteness as the most important axis of solidarity. But that’s politics, which is only an outer membrane of experience. Faith’s consequences may work out there, but faith lives deeper in. I could do the politics, but it was harder writing the slightly off-beam canticles to be sung in my imagined city. And hardest of all was my collision with that very real thing, the Latin Mass. (Inevitable for the year 1922 in any world.) I had imagined in my Protestant naivety that it would be essentially the same thing as the English Mass as I had known it from the 1970s, only in Latin. I was shocked, genuinely shocked, by the inaudibility to the congregation of virtually everything after the Sursum Corda. In fact I think I still am. The thought of the central Eucharistic prayers being, not just remoter linguistically, but actually separated from the direct attention of the faithful, gave me one of those jarring moments of estrangement where familiarity flips over, and you realise there is far more to be understood, and entered into, and sympathised with, than you ever imagined. The world: stranger than you think. Catholicism: stranger than I thought. It has all been most educational. And despite the generous help of a couple of real Jesuits, I have already spotted two embarrassing mistakes now that the book is printed and it’s too late. I leave the discovery of others as an exercise for the reader. The Catholic reader. The kindly, indulgent, forgiving Catholic reader.

Cory Doctorow enjoying Cahokia Jazz:

"Francis Spufford's Cahokia Jazz is a fucking banger: it's a taut, unguessable whuddunit, painted in ultrablack noir, set in an alternate Jazz Age in a world where indigenous people never ceded most the west to the USA. It's got gorgeously described jazz music, a richly realized modern indigenous society, and a spectacular romance. It's amazing!"

Why alter history? It’s something you can only do in fiction, and there’s the beginning of an answer in itself.

It is, apart from anything else, a way of celebrating fiction’s power to summon a setting out of thin air, out of mere words, only applied not to a place but to an entire timeline. What was fixed becomes fluid, what was inevitable becomes optional, what could previously be leant on out there in the world – a history everyone shares – becomes the writer’s responsibility to invent, to curate, to edit. Very gratifying to any novelist’s inner megalomaniac.

But what do you get from it, as a storyteller? Well, several different possible things, in line with the wild multiplication of alternative histories and their rise into cultural visibility. There’s a lot of it about. What began in the 1920s and 1930s as an obscure little parlour game for scholars grew up, thanks to a few individually brilliant science fiction novels – Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee (1955) and Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962) – into a whole thriving subgenre of written SF, with its own traditions and expectations and (of course) clichés, throwing off from time to time ideas so potent that they burst out in turn into new sub-sub-genres. The whole of steampunk exists because of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s alternative history The Difference Engine, published back in the 1980s. And now alt-hist has overflowed genre altogether and become part of the mainstream. What-might-have-been is part of the ordinary array of narrative possibilities in literary fiction, comic books, superhero movies, TV drama. Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life butted up against the door of alt-hist. Sandra Newman’s extraordinary novel The Heavens, which begins in utopia and then decays by stages back into our own history, is alt-hist. Philip Roth wrote some alt-hist (The Plot Against America). Bridgerton is alt-hist, for heavens’ sake.

Some fixed points remain in all this proliferation. The two most common things for alt-hist to change in the past are still, by a large margin, the outcome of the American Civil War and the outcome of World War Two. Victorious Confederates, victorious Nazis, over and over again. Some of this may be a sort of founder effect, a path dependency, a consequence of Moore’s and Dick’s early adventures in alt-hist having happened to tell those two particular stories. But I think it’s the combination in both cases of neat military turning point with vast moral stakes. On the outcome of a battle depends the triumph, or not, of a spectacular and unambiguous evil.

But then beyond the big two come endless other alterations. You can take your pick from unfallen empires (Roman, British) to colonialism run in reverse, from technology slowed to technology accelerated. An abundance of alterations in an abundance of moods, from wry to catastrophic by way of heart-rendingly desirable.

And now the attractions for the writer, in genre and out of it, begin to come into focus. Alt-history writing has its incidental pleasures – a kind of wit you can exercise, in remixing the past, putting familiar things and people in unfamiliar places and vice versa. But at root, and especially when it is taken seriously, it is all about illuminating something in real history. Alt-hist works by resonating with true-hist. It is about showing – sidelong, again – the weight of what really came to pass, by stopping us taking it for granted. By putting the real thing back, defamiliarised, with the apparent inevitability stripped off it, we see it as one possibility among others. We see real history in a space of might-have-beens, and are enabled to make comparisons. This sounds abstract, but it needn’t be; the result can be much richer than a thought experiment, because the relationship to the real past is felt, in good alternative history. It makes a wistful, or a tragic, or an angry, or a yearning acknowledgement of the real course of events.

The best single alt-hist novel I know is Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, set in a Yiddish-speaking enclave on the coast of Alaska which, in this world, has come to be instead of the state of Israel. The book is lovely, wise-cracking noir, with a voice and a protagonist that would be sufficient pleasures in themselves: but the starting point for writing it was Chabon’s discovery of a (real) Yiddish phrase book from the 1950s, which contained useful guidance for calling the police in Yiddish, renewing your passport in Yiddish, crossing a frontier in Yiddish, when all those things presuppose what never existed, a Yiddish nation, a 20th century homeland for European Jews with Yiddish as its mother tongue. So he provided one. It was magic, but painful magic. For the point of a wish that undoes the Holocaust is that a wish can’t undo the Holocaust – except in the 411 pages of a fiction.

Similarly – if it works – I am trying in my own new novel Cahokia Jazz to explore the real weight of real American history, by providing for 475 pages a world where the continent of North America wasn’t conveniently emptied by European diseases as the colonists arrived. In Cahokia Jazz there has had to be a mixture of indigenous and settler cultures, rather than Native Americans being pushed to the margins. I hope that while you read, the city of Cahokia with its ancient core and its factories feels real. Real enough, so that when my riff on the old standard tune of American history is over, and you look up from the busy streets with the clanging streetcar bells, and find that in its place there is only a quiet archaeological site beside the Mississippi river – the absence of all that life suddenly seems strange.

My friend Alan Jacobs – warning: my friend Alan Jacobs, though he isn't known for compromises in his criticism – has written a long and wonderful blog post about the book.