![]() ![]() I studied Gothic literature at university, and heard about (but did not read) a book called Melmoth the Wanderer, written in 1820 by an Irish Anglican priest Charles Maturin. It’s just my kind of book, and so I was eager to read her latest offering. Sarah Perry is a British author who won many fans with her second novel, The Essex Serpent (including me!) An eerie magic realism novel set in Victorian times, The Essex Serpent had a forbidden love story at its heart, along with sightings of a monstrous human-devouring snake. 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. 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. ![]()
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