There is a clarity to these historical sections, a care and restraint. )Įach detour in Melmoth could be its own novel, and I was often sorry to leave them. She won the 2004 Shiva Naipaul Memorial prize for travel writing for 'A Little Unexpected,' an article about her experiences in the Philippines. In 2013 she was a writer in residence at Gladstone's Library. It was placed on the long list for the 2017 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. Perry's second nove, The Essex Serpent, was nominated in the Novel category for the 2016 Costa Book Awards and was named Waterstones Book Of The Year 2016. Fiction in the Gothic inheritance makes much of the potent importance of the interior, from the castle where Jonathan Harker finds himself holed up to Thornfield, and from the suburban homes in Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black to the ghastly crypts in The Monk.

I wrote about the power of place in my PhD thesis, particularly the importance of buildings in the Gothic (a genre which I find myself inhabiting without ever having meant to). Her doctoral thesis was on the Gothic in the writing of Iris Murdoch, and Perry has subsequently published an article on the Gothic in Aeon magazine. She has a PhD in creative writing from Royal Holloway University where her supervisor was English novelist and poet, Sir Andrew Motion.

She says this early immersion in old literature and the King James Bible profoundly influenced her writing style. She filled her time with classical music, classic novels and poetry, and church-related activities. Perry grew up with little, if any, access to contemporary art, culture, and writing. Perry was born in Chelmsford, Essex, into a family of devout Christians who were members of a Strict Baptist church. She has had two novels published: The Essex Serpent (2016) and After Me Comes the Flood (2014).

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

Melmoth legend