The literary sensation and Waterstones Book of the Year: a thrilling and unforgettable historical novel of love and intrigue now out in paperback
Sarah Perry was born in Essex in 1979. She has a PhD in creative writing from Royal Holloway, and has been the writer in residence at the Gladstone Library and the UNESCO World City of Literature Writer in Residence in Prague. Her first novel, After Me Comes the Flood, was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Folio Prize, and won the East Anglian Book of the Year Award in 2014. She lives in Norwich.
The Essex Serpent is a novel to relish: a work of great
intelligence and charm, by a hugely talented author
*Sarah Waters*
Had Charles Dickens and Bram Stoker come together to write the
great Victorian novel, I wonder if it would have surpassed The
Essex Serpent? No way of knowing, but with only her second outing,
Sarah Perry establishes herself as one of the finest fiction
writers working in Britain today.
*John Burnside*
A big, warm, generous novel that wears its considerable wisdom
lightly, The Essex Serpent is an absolute pleasure from start to
finish - I truly didn't want it to end.
*Melissa Harrison*
The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry [is] a joyous and beguiling book
that wrapped itself around me rather like its eponymous
monster.
*Cathy Rentzenbrink*
A blissful novel of unapologetic appetites, where desire and faith
mingle on the marshes, but friendship is the miracle. Sarah Perry
has the rare gift of committing the uncommittable to prose - that
is to say: here is a writer who understands life.
*Jessie Burton*
A book to make you want to be a better person.
*Justine Jordan, The Guardian*
I loved this book. At once numinous, intimate and wise, The Essex
Serpent is a marvellous novel about the workings of life, love and
belief, about science and religion, secrets, mysteries, and the
complicated and unexpected shifts of the human heart - and it
contains some of the most beautiful evocations of place and
landscape I've ever read. It is so good its pages seem lit from
within. As soon as I'd finished it I started reading it again.
*Helen MacDonald*
A sinuous historical novel by the genius that is Sarah Perry
*Stylist*
An historical novel with real depth ... Perry writes fantastically,
and this deserves attention for the rest of the year.
*The Bookseller*
One day this book will make a fine BBC period drama ... Perry is a
wonderful descriptive writer with a remarkable talent for making
the familiar strange ... Her accounts of open-heart surgery carried
out half a century before antibiotics, or an autistic child
questioning the nature of sin, or a soldier's wedding in the
phthisic slums of Bethnal Green, snatch the breath in your throat.
Perry bleeds light into darkness and back again with a mastery born
of her deep professional acquaintance with the gothic
tradition.
*Times*
The Essex Serpent is a work of historical fiction, set in the
1890s, which, for originality, richness of prose and depth of
characterisation is unlikely to be bettered this year ... a
remarkable novel. Although Will and Cora provide the focal points
for her story, Perry has packed The Essex Serpent with a rich array
of equally rounded characters to hold our attention. The novel is
full of vivid set pieces ... it is Perry's ability to conjure up a
sense of entire lives unfolding before our eyes that is most
impressive. Filled with wisdom about human behaviour and
motivations, and written in a distinctive, stylish prose, The Essex
Serpent is one of the most memorable historical novels of the past
decade.
*Sunday Times*
One for the holiday suitcase. A historical romance with a gothic
twist ... expect to spot a copy on beach towels this summer.
*Vogue*
An irresistible novel that taps the vein of Victorian gothic and
British myth
*Daily Telegraph*
It's prompted comparisons to both Dickens and Bram Stoker and
marries the former's abhorrence of injustice with the latter's
genius for unsettling atmosphere ... Hardy-esque ... a rich and
complex novel but also a deeply enjoyable read, with warm humanity
at its core.
*iPaper*
An irresistible novel ... Perry's Victoriana is the most
fresh-feeling I can remember ... Her prose is often beautiful ...
the tone is a masterstroke ... You feel the influences of Mary
Shelley, Bram Stoker, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Hilary
Mantel channelled by Perry in some sort of Victorian séance. This
is the best new novel I've read in years. It's the kind of work
that makes you alive to the strangeness of the world and of our
history.
*Daily Telegraph*
Engaging ... On the book's cover, John Burnside compares The Essex
Serpent to Dickens and Stoker. But it was one of my favourite
novels, Alasdair Gray's Poor Things (1992), that kept coming back
to me ... Perry takes apart our preconceptions of prim Victorian
mores with similar gusto ... The Essex Serpent is a historical
novel with an entirely modern consciousness, and is every bit as
gripping and unusual as its predecessor.
*FT*
The Essex Serpent is frightfully good.
*Twitter*
An intelligent, lushly written gothic yarn ... Reading it makes you
want to hotfoot it to the Essex coast.
*Metro*
Everything they're saying is true: sumptuous, beautiful, powerful,
engrossing, brilliant.
*Twitter*
A lovely book ... it sets out unashamedly to lift the spirits ...
The writing has a gorgeous lilt ... The method is itself Victorian
- an omniscient narrator scattering sackfuls of sympathy - but the
message never gets old: the world is poorer if we don't put
ourselves in each other's place once in a while.
*Spectator*
Sarah Perry's new novel The Essex Serpent is a thing of beauty
inside and out. I don't think I've ever mentioned a book's cover in
a review before, but Peter Dyer's William Morris-inspired design is
stunning, a tantalizing taste of the equally sumptuous prose that
lies within ... When it comes to historical fiction, Perry's
achieved the near impossible; she's created a novel and within it a
world that seems to have sprung complete and fully formed directly
from the period in question - a long lost fin-de-siècle Gothic
classic - but her characters are as enticingly modern as they are
of their period ... Perry also showcases the most beguiling
evocations of landscape ... For only a second novel it's a stunning
achievement, one for which I predict prize nominations galore, from
the Wellcome to the Man Booker
*Independent online*
A richly themed and exhilarating novel ... this poetically written
story dramatises the clash between rationality and resurgent
superstition, between desire, morality and the intellect, and the
struggle of reformers to redress the poverty of late-Victorian
society.
*Daily Mail*
Sarah Perry has written an exquisitely absorbing, old-fashioned
page-turner peopled by memorable characters, particularly the
magnificent, stubborn and wilful Cora. Perry also captures a
society on the brink of a profound shift, uncomfortably reassessing
its view of the world through the prism of scientific progress.
The Essex Serpent is shot through with such a vivid, lively sense
of the period that it reads like Charles Dickens at his most
accessible and fans of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell will also find
much to love in this engaging, entertaining Gothic novel.
*Daily Express*
A novel of ideas, and flexes its muscles in addressing multiple
concerns of the period ... The novel probes at both private emotion
and public concerns, and is engrossing and immersive. The grime of
London is only surpassed by the murk of Aldwinter. Cora makes for
an indelible heroine: uncompromising, funny and smart, and not
unlike Alma Whittaker in Elizabeth Gilbert's The Signature of All
Things. There will also be whispers of Dickens or a gamut of 19th
century novels of similar size and scale, but Perry's voice and
story are her own. Her language is exquisite, her characterisation
finely tuned. Based on The Essex Serpent and its predecessor, it's
clear that Perry is a gifted writer of immense ability.
*Irish Times*
A Victorian-era gothic with a Dickensian focus on societal ills,
Perry's second novel surprises in its wonderful freshness. There's
a sense of Llareggub about close-knit Aldwinter, its flint church,
historic oak and ribby shipwreck instantly present, while the
tapestry of voices that results from the use of letters amplifies
the Under Milk Wood echo. Perry's singular characters are drawn
with a fondness that is both palpable and contagious, and the
beautifully observed changing seasons permitted space to breathe,
all making for pure pleasure.
*Observer*
An eerie tale of science and superstition ... gothically good.
*Sunday Express*
It's 1893, and Cora Seabourne is a young widow whose husband's
death has released her from a miserable marriage. Finally free to
follow her own interest in natural history, Cora heads to Essex,
hoping the recent reports of a mysterious ancient serpent may
possibly turn out to be proof of a "living fossil . . . a species
outwitting extinction". There she meets the local vicar, Will
Ransome, and despite his scepticism about science and her lack of
faith in religion, the two forge an unlikely bond. A bewitching and
luminous book about science, faith and different kinds of love.
*Irish Times*
Dazzling
*Woman and Home*
The Essex Serpent is rare in being a novel that is both highly
diverting and intellectually rewarding, in taking its thematic
interests seriously while playing delightedly with romance and the
Gothic.
*The Lancet*
Sarah Perry...beautifully and deeply...elucidates friendships of
all kinds in her books...I must recommend the delicate beauty and
sinuous power.
*Stylist*
It's a brilliantly written story of one woman's life and
relationships in late Victorian England and my favourite historical
novel since Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger.
*Irish Independent*
A graceful and intelligent book.
*Daily Record*
The Essex Serpent is probably the best novel I have read this year.
It is the right kind of literary fiction: full of ideas, challenge,
and intrigue, but with a compelling narrative that tows you through
the pages like a freight train...Perry has created an ensemble of
characters so richly drawn that each could warrant a novel in his
or her own right...invigorating, fascinating, and hugely
enjoyable.
*Church Times*
My stand-out novel of the year is The Essex Serpent...It's about
love, faith and myth. I loved it.
*Radio Times*
The eponymous serpent makes its presence felt throughout, but this
novel is about much, much more than a winged demon terrorising the
Essex countryside, and is all the richer for it.
*Living North*
One of the most-loved books of the last two years...Perry's
descriptions of Essex bring to life the beauty of one of our more
under-appreciated counties.
*Emerald Street*
The Essex Serpent has been hailed as a modern classic, and for good
reason. It's an esoteric, whimsical book that joins the ranks of
generations of Victorian and Gothic novels from Doyle to Shelley,
all the while defying the very traditions these books have set
down... The perfect book to read as you sit in an overgrown garden,
or while tramping through the heath.
*The Edinburgh Reporter*
A Notable Book of 2017
*New York Times*
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