**Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2021****Winner of the RSL Encore Award**From the author of Golden Hill ''My god he can write.'' Richard Osman‘Glorious.’ Evening Standard‘Exhilarating.’ TLS‘Brilliant.’ Observer‘Dazzling.’ The Times‘Extraordinary.’ Financial Times‘Superb.’ GuardianNovember 1944. A German rocket strikes London and five young children are atomised in an instant. Here are the futures they might have known, had they experienced the unimaginable changes of the twentieth century — futures that illuminate the miraculous in the everyday, and the preciousness of life itself.