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
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
“Reels you in, using the same trick of all the best ghost stories, from The Turn of the Screw on: Is there really a ghost before you? Or do you see the projection of your own secret sins and desires? What is more frightening than the human?” New York Times
Review
“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
Review
“Ms. Perry, whose last book, The Essex Serpent, was a breakout hit, again proves herself a master of atmosphere.” Wall Street Journal
Review
“An unforgettable achievement…Perry’s heartbreaking, horrifying monster confronts the characters not just with the uncanny but also with the human: with humanity’s complicity in history’s darkest moments, its capacity for guilt, its power of witness, and its longing for both companionship and redemption.” Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
About the Author
Sarah Perry is the internationally bestselling author of The Essex Serpent and After Me Comes the Flood. She lives in England.