Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford

"Lunchtime, a Saturday, 1944: the Woolworths on Bexford High Street in southeast London has a new delivery of aluminum saucepans. A crowd gathers to see the first new metal in ages - after all, everything's been melted down for the war effort. An instant later, the crowd is gone; incinerated. In it were five little children. Atomised. Who were they? What future did they lose? Running another reel, another version of time, Perpetual Light is the rest of the twentieth century as the five children's destinies were extended. Their intimate everyday dramas, as sons and daughters, spouses, parents, grandparents; as the separated, the remarried, the bereaved. Through decades of social, sexual and technological transformation, as bus conductors and landlords, as swindlers and teachers, patients and inmates. Days of personal triumphs, disasters; of second chances and redemption, all amidst the bustling, humming multitudes of London. Five lives and stories told in beams of light, not ends."--Publisher.