Nonesuch

The novel opens with a flash-forward to the London Blitz of 1940. Iris Hawkins recites a spell from a ninth-floor office window and awakens the giant granite Mariner statue on her building's façade. The narrative notes that much later Iris will ask the Mariner to tell her where all past years are, foreshadowing the quest to come.

In August 1939, Iris is a sharp, ambitious young woman from Watford who works as a teleprinter operator at the stockbrokerage Cornellis & Blome, dreaming of financial power in the City of London. On a night out, she meets Miles Ormond, a socialist broker, and his companion Eleanor Armbruster, a sculptor. Eleanor befriends Iris and takes her to a bohemian club in Fitzrovia. There Iris meets Lalage "Lall" Cunningham, a fascist sympathizer who works as a booker for the BBC, and Geoffrey "Geoff" Hale, a gangly young BBC engineer. When Lall insults her, Iris retaliates by seducing Geoff on the dance floor and taking him home to his cottage on Wildwood Terrace in Hampstead. Their encounter is intense but ends badly: It is his first sexual experience, and he tells Iris it felt lonely. That night, she glimpses from his window a terrifying figure whose face appears made of shifting newspaper print and whose body moves with inhuman fluidity. She flees at dawn without giving Geoff her full name.

War is declared. London blacks out its lights, and Iris processes mountains of government paperwork. In late October, the newspaper-faced creature reappears in the blackout and chases Iris through the streets. She escapes on a bus across London Bridge. Geoff dismisses her account, but his father, Cyprian Hale, a kindly former member of a secret occult Order, contacts Iris. He explains that the creature is a Watcher: a spirit of the lower air enslaved by the Order and bound in newspaper and old clothes to guard their esoteric materials at the cottage. He gives Iris a small inscribed paper disc designed to dissolve the binding.

The Watcher corners Iris and Geoff outside the Mariner Building. They flee into the covered market at Leadenhall, where Iris discovers the creature cannot see through a living body. Using Geoff as a shield, she presses the disc onto its face. The binding dissolves, and the freed spirit erupts as a luminous cloud that circles joyfully around Iris before streaking into the sky. Her right arm feels changed.

At Wildwood Terrace, Mr. Hale suggests someone deliberately redirected the Watcher. Iris suspects Lall, who is the goddaughter of the Order's Grand Master and knows about the house. Iris and Geoff impulsively perform a summoning ritual using instruments found in the attic, drawing forth a far greater being: a blue angel of staggering complexity that denounces them for enslaving spirits and commands them to stop. When Iris touches Geoff with her changed hand, she receives an overwhelming flash of his entire inner life. The disc has inscribed a permanent rule on her: Genuine touch motivated by care conveys empathic insight, but instrumental or manipulative touch produces deadening numbness.

Over the winter of 1939-40, Iris takes a Chelsea flat under a false name, visits Mr. Hale regularly to care for him, and exchanges cautious letters with Geoff, now in the army. She confronts Lall, who admits to sending the Watcher. The Grand Master installs a fascist thug at Wildwood Terrace to keep Iris away. When Britain's fascists are rounded up in May 1940, Iris arranges for the thug's arrest. After the Dunkirk evacuation, Geoff appears outside the Mariner Building, traumatized and drunk. Iris takes him home, and they make love with an intensity that terrifies them both, her changed hand transmitting images of war.

The next morning, the blue angel returns, identifying itself as Raphael, Prince of the Air. It warns that someone has begun activating Nonesuch, an ancient network of captive angels embedded in statues across London's rooftops. Built by the Elizabethan alchemist Hieronymus Dawe, the network forms a bridge to a place beyond time from which the past can be altered. Raphael suspects someone wants to prevent Churchill from becoming Prime Minister. The bridge opens only during the dark of the moon and requires eight spans between statues containing enslaved spirits. Since Geoff must return to duty, Iris takes on the mission alone. Through Ormond at the Treasury, she gets Lall barred from one key building, but the bridge can be entered at any statue containing a captive spirit. Meanwhile, Iris stakes her savings on the conviction that the stock market is absurdly cheap.

The Blitz begins in late August. Iris volunteers for fire-watch duty on the Mariner Building's roof. On successive dark-of-the-moon nights, she recites the spell, steps onto the Mariner's stone hand, and traverses a translucent bridge through warped space, claiming arches to block Lall. Each enslaved statue tries to devour her. On the October traverse, she encounters Lall on a Moorgate rooftop and shoves her off the edge, then hauls her back up. Lall spares Iris in acknowledgment of the rescue, declaring a temporary truce.

Mr. Hale is killed when a bomb destroys Wildwood Terrace. Geoff moves into Iris's flat and proposes marriage. She refuses, fearing absorption into domesticity. Their relationship nearly collapses until a painful midnight conversation breaks through: Iris confesses her deepest ambition, to be rich and powerful, a tycoon. Geoff responds with genuine enthusiasm, sharing his own dreams of television innovation. They rebuild on mutual knowledge and separate ambitions, and she accepts his engagement ring at Christmas.

Iris visits Lall and discovers that working as an ambulance driver during the Blitz has transformed Lall. She has formed genuine friendships and reframed her mission: She no longer wants to serve fascism but to erase the Blitz entirely, undoing all the deaths, including Mr. Hale's. Iris cannot argue her out of it.

Geoff concludes that bomb damage has destroyed enough statues to prevent Lall from assembling the eight arches required. He is wrong. On December 29, Lall ambushes Iris, binds her with an enslaved spirit woven into fabric, and forces her along the bridge as London burns in its worst raid. Nonesuch itself serves as the final node. They arrive at Nonesuch, a place of incomprehensible beauty attended by horned, faun-like beings. Raphael transports Geoff there, and he frees Iris.

Iris follows Lall through Nonesuch's time-door to September 29, 1939, where Lall intends to shoot Churchill outside the Admiralty. Iris seizes the gun, cannot fire it, and pushes Lall into the path of a lorry, killing her. Devastated, Iris returns to Nonesuch and demands one more use of the time-door: to November 2, 1933, when her seven-year-old brother Guy died in a house fire that Iris, then 15, failed to save him from. This event, and her mother's unforgiving blame, drove Iris from home and shaped her entire adult life. The fauns warn that changing the past exacts a price. Iris enters the burning house and throws her brother from the window.

As she falls through the collapsing floor, history rewrites itself. Guy always survived; her mother never blamed her; the independence, the lovers, meeting Geoff, the angels, all stream away, replaced by a life Iris cannot remember choosing. She finds herself on the roof of Faraday House during London's worst night of fire, remembering nothing of what she has lost.