I loved Sarah Perry's last book, The Essex Serpent, and was really looking forward to Melmoth. I always hate starting off the year with a disappointing read. 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 the witness