2 Books Like Melting Point

Five young lives are cut short by a German bombing of a South London department store in the final year of World War II. Francis Spufford takes the reader inside the physics of the milli-second explosion before asking, What if these five toddlers had lived? That speculation becomes the trope of this highly original novel. Spufford has us follow the (potential?) lives of Vernon, Alec, Val, Jo, and Ben, jumping into their worlds in 15-year increments, starting in a postwar grade school music class, through the free-wheeling Sixties, the punk-inflected Seventies, to the characters' own seventies in the 21st century.

Spufford wears his research boldly. In this book, he takes us into the world view of a (possibly) schizophrenic character and a (definite) synaesthesic. We learn the technological ins and outs of a publishing compositor (before he is displaced in the digital revolution) and get enlightening glimpses into both a… show more.

Niall Williams's book is balm for an ailing soul and a gift to readers. The title might suggest a saccharine, feel-good novel, but it is not. Christie, the book's big-hearted catalyzing character utters the title phrase precisely when he is thwarted in love, indicating that happiness is not a state but a state of mind. When tragedy arrives at the end, Christie, with difficulty, is still able to find the fullness of life.

But the narrator, 16-year-old No, is otherwise the main character of the book. From the perspective of sixty years hence, Noel recounts the life-changing events of 1960, when the rains suddenly stopped, spring felt like summer, and both Christie and electrification came to the western Irish village of Faha. The story is told recursively, in what I read as the great Irish oral storytelling tradition. Don't be put off by the slow start. The plot takes hold… show more.