As soon as I’d finished it I started reading it again.'-Helen MacDonald, author of H is for HawkĪn exquisitely talented young British author makes her American debut with this rapturously acclaimed historical novel, set in late nineteenth-century England, about an intellectually minded young widow, a pious vicar, and a rumored mythical serpent that explores questions about science and religion, skepticism, and faith, independence and love. It is so good its pages seem lit from within. At once numinous, intimate and wise, The Essex Serpent is a marvelous 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. Like Lauren Groff’s The Monsters of Templeton (2008), the appearance of a sea monster sheds more light on humanity than on natural history, while the sudden revelation of a creature of the deep heralds change and revelation, as in Jim Lynch’s The Highest Tide (2005).Costa Book Award Finalist and the Waterstones (UK) Book of the Year 2016 Book-discussion groups will have a field day with the imagery, the well-developed characters, and the concepts of innocence, evil, and guilt. The vivid, often frightening imagery (the Leviathan, a shack sinking in the bog, the scrape of scales moving up the shingle) and the lush descriptions (“stained glass angels had the wings of jays”) create a magical background for the sensual love story between Sarah and Will.

A medieval “winged serpent” myth still holds the inhabitants of Aldwinter in thrall, despite the best efforts of the local rector, Will Ransome and as Perry’s second novel (following After Me Comes the Flood, 2015) wends its way through mysterious disappearances, fog-laden visions, suspicion, and tragedy, it seems as if the monster is real.

Secret love and the suggestion of something unearthly moving in the Essex Blackwater drive the intricate plot of this atmospheric historical novel about Cora Seaborne, a widow visiting Colchester with her companion, ostensibly to explore the estuary for fossils.

The essex serpent book