'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) 'Filled with thought-provoking ideas on historical guilt and personal responsibility, as well as a depth of learning.the message at its heart is an uplifting one even if redemption for wrongdoing cannot always be achieved, there is power in bearing witness.'- Financial Times 'The author of The Essex Serpent casts another haunting spell in this exquisitely written gothic novel.'- People '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 '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

'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

To Helen it all seems the stuff of unenlightened fantasy.īut, unaware, as she wanders the cobblestone streets Helen is being watched. As such superstition has it, Melmoth travels through the ages, dooming those she persuades to join her to a damnation of timeless, itinerant solitude. 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.

In Prague, working as a translator, she has found a home of sorts-or, at least, refuge. It has been years since Helen Franklin left England. In Melmoth, Sarah Perry's breathtaking follow-up to The Essex Serpent, a mysterious dark-robed figure has roamed the globe for centuries, searching for those whose complicity and cowardice have fed into the rapids of history's darkest waters-and now, it is heading in our direction. Perry did as much in her richly praised novel The Essex Serpent, but this is a deeper, more complex novel and more rewarding.'- The Washington Post 'Masterful.scary and smart, working as a horror story but also a philosophical inquiry into the nature of will and love. From the internationally bestselling author of The Essex Serpent-soon to be an Apple TV+ Series

Melmoth review