1944: A crowd gathers at the Woolworths on Bexford High Street in southeast London. An instant later, the crowd is gone; incinerated. Among the shoppers were five young children. In an alternative reel of time, the life arcs of these five souls are followed through the extraordinary, unimaginable changes of the bustling immensity of twentieth-century London. Through decades of social, sexual, and technological transformation, as bus conductors and landlords, as swindlers and teachers, patients and inmates, we witness their disasters, second chances, and redemption.

1944: the Woolworths on Bexford High Street in southeast London receives a delivery of aluminum saucepans. A crowd gathers to see the new arrival, but an instant later, the crowd is gone; incinerated.

A novel set in 1944 London imagines the lives of five children who perished during a bombing at a local store, tracing their everyday dramas as they live through the extraordinary, unimaginable changes of twentieth-century London.