Staff Pick
Sarah Perry’s beautiful novels richly reward the patient reader. Her world building is lavish and precise; though her prose often tilts into poetry, her characters are crystalline, giving the writing a paradoxical quality that is both ornate and bare. This confusion between what is exposed and what only imagined drives the wonderfully creepy Melmoth, in which a fabled wanderer combs the world for human wickedness, doling out consolation and punishment. Melmoth builds tension ever so slowly, drawing both character and reader unawares into the black folds of the wanderer’s cloak, until neither party is sure that what they find there is a figure of righteous justice, or just the frantic claustrophobia of their own guilty minds. Recommended By Rhianna W., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
"Masterful...scary and smart, working as a horror story but also a philosophical inquiry into the nature of will and love. Perry did as much in her richly praised novel The Essex Serpent, but this is a deeper, more complex novel and more rewarding." Washington Post
For centuries, the mysterious dark-robed figure has roamed the globe, searching for those whose complicity and cowardice have fed into the rapids of history's darkest waters — and now, in Sarah Perry's breathtaking follow-up to The Essex Serpent, it is heading in our direction.
It has been years since Helen Franklin left England. In Prague, working as a translator, she has found a home of sorts — or, at least, refuge. That changes when her friend Karel discovers a mysterious letter in the library, a strange confession and a curious warning that speaks of Melmoth the Witness, a dark legend found in obscure fairy tales and antique village lore. As such superstition has it, Melmoth travels through the ages, dooming those she persuades to join her to a damnation of timeless, itinerant solitude. To Helen it all seems the stuff of unenlightened fantasy.
But, unaware, as she wanders the cobblestone streets Helen is being watched. And then Karel disappears. . . .
Review
"A novel that manages that vanishingly rare feat - being at once hugely readable and profoundly important...Perry's masterly piece of postmodern gothic is one of the great literary achievements of our young century." The Guardian
Review
"The last few years have brought a glut of fashionably affectless and amoral fiction....Sarah Perry's fierce, full-hearted books about love and ethics feel like an antidote to that elegant apathy....In a world that feels desperate, chaotic, and unredeemable, Melmoth asks us to be witnesses for each other." NPR
Review
"Haunting...Whether you want an unsettling autumnal read or a compelling piece of literary horror, this book will satisfy your craving and keep you hooked till the very last page." Book Riot
Review
"In rich, lyrical prose, Perry weaves history and myth, human frailty and compassion, into an affecting gothic morality tale for 2018. A chilling novel about confronting our complicity in past atrocities — and retaining the strength and moral courage to strive for the future." Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
Review
"A brilliant, spooky meditation on the sins of history...If The Essex Serpent mined Victorian history for a legend and worked it up into a romance with broader social themes, then Melmoth repeats that trick in multiple dimensions." New Republic
About the Author
Sarah Perry is the internationally bestselling author of The Essex Serpent and After Me Comes the Flood. She lives in England.