Imagine a missile hitting a department store in London in 1944. Imagine the children shopping at that moment with their parents, those young, unlived lives obliterated in that second of heat and noise. It would make a good beginning to a story, wouldn’t it? But how much better would the story be if the tape, having moved forward just a little, could be re-wound and we instead imagine the missile falling a few seconds later or a hundred yards further on. What would happen to those same children twenty, thirty, fifty years later? What would the trajectory of a life have been if the trajectory of the missile had been slightly different? Imagine following those children’s lives knowing that they all grow from a common experience, the moment the bomb exploded (or didn’t explode), the moment the bomb fell on them (or fell safely somewhere else). Wouldn’t the story of their lives be so much more poignant in the knowledge that those lives came to maturity (or perhaps didn’t) because the beginning was ever so slightly different?

This is everyone’s experience. Turn left at the intersection instead of right. Leave the office an hour later or earlier. Buy the red scarf instead of the blue one. How is a life changed by a decision or by the accumulation of an infinite number of decisions? Light Perpetual follows the lives of six children extinguished by that V-2 rocket, lives saved and allowed to take their course over six decades of London history. Time passes. Everything ends. Whatever the choices you make (or don’t make).