In Brilliant, award-winning author Jane Brox offers a sweeping history of our transformative relationship with light from the stone lamps of the Pleistocene to LEDs embedded in fabrics of the future and reveals that the surprising, complex story of our illumination is also the story of our modern selves.

Just five hundred years ago almost everyone lived at the mercy of the dark, yet today so much of life as we know it our long evening hours, our flexible working days, our feelings of safety at night depends upon cheap, abundant light. Brox not only examines the social and...