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Returnable | Yes |
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Enlightenment: A Novel Hardcover – June 4, 2024
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“Like A.S. Byatt’s Possession, Enlightenment is a baroque, genre-bending novel of ideas, ghosts and hidden histories. A richly layered epic....a heartfelt paean to the consolations of the sublime, where religion and science meet." -- Telegraph
"Read it, then read it again. This is a book full of unexpected wonders." -- Literary Review
From the author of The Essex Serpent, a dazzling novel of love and astronomy told over the course of twenty years through the lives of two improbable best friends.
Thomas Hart and Grace Macaulay have lived all their lives in the small Essex town of Aldleigh. Though separated in age by three decades, the pair are kindred spirits—torn between their commitment to religion and their desire to explore the world beyond their small Baptist community.
It is two romantic relationships that will rend their friendship, and in the wake of this rupture, Thomas develops an obsession with a vanished nineteenth-century astronomer said to haunt a nearby manor, and Grace flees Aldleigh entirely for London. Over the course of twenty years, by coincidence and design, Thomas and Grace will find their lives brought back into orbit as the mystery of the vanished astronomer unfolds into a devastating tale of love and scientific pursuit. Thomas and Grace will ask themselves what it means to love and be loved, what is fixed and what is mutable, how much of our fate is predestined and written in the stars, and whether they can find their way back to each other.
A thrillingly ambitious novel of friendship, faith, and unrequited love, rich in symmetry and symbolism, Enlightenment is a shimmering wonder of a book and Sarah Perry’s finest work to date.
- Print length384 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherMariner Books
- Publication dateJune 4, 2024
- Dimensions6 x 1.11 x 9 inches
- ISBN-100063352613
- ISBN-13978-0063352612
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From the Publisher
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The Essex Serpent | The Essex Serpent TV Tie-in | After Me Comes the Flood | Melmoth | |
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Price | $10.15$10.15 | $9.00$9.00 | $6.99$6.99 | $16.13$16.13 |
Editorial Reviews
Review
"An absorbing and affecting narrative of emotional turmoil and astronomical discovery...Ms. Perry’s characters—and this circumscribed place—are so convincingly and subtly drawn that no plot twist seems outlandish and no sentiment hackneyed." — Wall Street Journal
"Enchanting...Perry magnificently evokes the wonder of the cosmos." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Perry seamlessly blends an absorbing mystery with her principal characters’ personal conflicts to create a narrative as propulsive as it is emotionally resonant." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Stunning...Perry’s shimmering prose draws readers gradually into the story, until suddenly, we are captivated by the rich, psychologically complex, and intimate characters as they grapple philosophically with issues of faith, religion, science, astronomy, and love in all its guises. Most impressive are Perry's command of language and the extensive knowledge of astronomy and physics that she nimbly incorporates into the narrative. With brilliant storytelling, Perry’s novel of dichotomies portrays how elliptical our lives are—very much like the movement of the stars." — Booklist (starred review)
"Many of Perry’s sentences are startlingly beautiful, creating an atmospheric sense of setting and character....There’s a hint of the literary romance and mystery of A.S. Byatt’s Possession." — BookPage (starred review)
"A fat, satisfying, grown-up novel – rich in plot, characters, ideas, structure, and atmosphere. Most writers only really deliver on a few of those; in this book about astronomy, faith, and devotional love in all its forms, Perry leaves none behind." — Independent (UK)
"Extraordinary and ambitious...What Perry has done in this layered, intelligent and moving book is to construct a kind of quantum novel, one that asks us to question conventional linear narratives and recognise instead what is ever-present in Perry’s luminous vision of Essex: truth, beauty and love." — Guardian (UK)
"A rich, surprising book that dazzles and dizzies the reader...recalls...the erudition of AS Byatt, the ungovernable romances of Iris Murdoch." — Financial Times
Like A.S. Byatt’s Possession, Enlightenment is a baroque, genre-bending novel of ideas, ghosts and hidden histories. A richly layered epic....a heartfelt paean to the consolations of the sublime, where religion and science meet." — Telegraph (UK)
"No novel is ever perfect, but this one comes close. Read it, then read it again. This is a book full of unexpected wonders." — Literary Review
“A novel to relish: a work of great intelligence and charm, by a hugely talented author.” — Sarah Waters on The Essex Serpent
“A novel of almost insolent ambition—lush and fantastical, a wild Eden behind a garden gate...it’s part ghost story and part natural history lesson, part romance and part feminist parable. I found it so transporting that 48 hours after completing it, I was still resentful to be back home.” — New York Times on The Essex Serpent
“Richly enjoyable...Ms. Perry writes beautifully and sometimes agreeably sharply...The Essex Serpent is a wonderfully satisfying novel. Ford Madox Ford thought the glory of the novel was its ability to make the reader think and feel at the same time. This one does just that.” — Wall Street Journal
“The most delightful heroine since Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice…Perry creates that delicate illusion of the best historical fiction: an authentic sense of the past—its manners, ideals and speech—that feels simultaneously distant and relevant to us…By the end, The Essex Serpent identifies a mystery far greater than some creature ‘from the illuminated margins of a manuscript’: friendship.” — Washington Post
About the Author
Sarah Perry is the internationally bestselling author of The Essex Serpent, Melmoth, and After Me Comes the Flood. She lives in England.
Product details
- Publisher : Mariner Books (June 4, 2024)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 384 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0063352613
- ISBN-13 : 978-0063352612
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 1.11 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #42,222 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #477 in Gothic Fiction
- #2,268 in Romantic Fantasy (Books)
- #3,862 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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It is 1997. Thomas Hart, 50, is a newspaper columnist for the Essex Chronicle in the small town of Aldleigh. Nick Carleton, editor of the Chronicle, gives Thomas a planisphere, a map of the stars that belonged to his late father. He suggests that Thomas write about the Hale-Bopp comet.
Then Thomas receives a letter from James Bower, who is doing renovation work at Lowlands House. Bower has discovered some documents relating to the disappearance of a woman in the 19th century. Astronomer Maria Vaduva Bell, the woman who disappeared in 1888, reportedly haunts Lowlands House.
Grace Macaulay is 17. Thomas has known her since her birth. Her father, Roland, brought the newborn Grace to the small Baptist church which Thomas attends. Rachel, Roland’s wife, died during childbirth. Thomas acts like Grace’s godfather. Anne Macaulay, Roland’s sister, moved in to help with Grace.
Though separated in age by three decades, Thomas and Grace are kindred spirits—torn between their commitment to religion and their desire to explore the world beyond their small Baptist community. But Thomas has a secret life in London, cruising bars and clubbing with men. Grace has just met Nathan, another teenager, who isn’t a member of her church. Their lives change.
“Enlightenment” at times seems like a historical novel, but it is disjointed. It jumps from character to character and moves in time. The characters and plot are not compelling. I just could not get into it. Sarah Perry is the author of “The Essex Serpent,” “Melmoth,” and “After Me Comes the Flood.”
The story encompasses twenty years in the lives of Thomas Hart—a fifty-year old lifelong bachelor who works as a columnist writer for the Essex Chronicle–, and Grace Macaulay, Thomas’ seventeen-year-old friend and fellow attendee of Bethesda Baptist Church in the town of Aldleigh, Essex, England. When the newspaper for which Thomas writes starts losing readers, circa 1997, the newly-minted editor gives Thomas the assignment to change his usual writing topic and try writing about astronomy and the newly approaching comet Hale-Bopp instead. What begins as a passing interest becomes an obsession when Thomas receives news that a ghost that is rumored to haunt the mansion located on the grounds where Bethesda Chapel is built on, may be the wife of the original mansion’s owner, Maria Vaduva Bell, a woman both elusive and fascinating—she was an amateur astronomer and left a diary that ends in Thomas’ hands.
Alternating between full on narration, Thomas Hart’s articles, Thomas’s and Maria’s epistolaries, and Maria’s diary entries, emerges the story of a ghost urging Thomas Hart to keep on learning and searching for answers, the ups and downs of Thomas and Grace’s friendship, and Maria’s quest to earn—through Thomas—her rightful place in history.
With easy prose, an all-knowing narrator (3rd person), and beautiful metaphors that give this novel a gothic, atmospheric (rainy weather adds to it) feel, Enlightenment is a literary page-turner that wrestles with the earthly and the divine, the spiritual and the supernatural, with matters of the flesh and of the heart. It addresses themes of longing, unrequited and lost love, faith and the loss of it, friendship, and science.
Entrancing, absorbing… An absolute winner!
Thanks to the publisher for granting me access to a free digital copy via Netgalley.