Melmoth: A Novel - Hardcover

Perry, Sarah

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0062856391 ISBN 13: 9780062856395

Publisher: Custom House, 2018

Synopsis

“Masterful...scary and smart, working as a horror story but also a philosophical inquiry into the nature of will and love. Perry did as much in her richly praised novel The Essex Serpent, but this is a deeper, more complex novel and more rewarding.” —Washington Post

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.

It has been years since Helen Franklin left England. In Prague, working as a translator, she has found a home of sorts—or, at least, refuge. 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. As such superstition has it, Melmoth travels through the ages, dooming those she persuades to join her to a damnation of timeless, itinerant solitude. To Helen it all seems the stuff of unenlightened fantasy.

But, unaware, as she wanders the cobblestone streets Helen is being watched. And then Karel disappears. . . .

About this title

From the Back Cover:

For centuries, a 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.

It has been years since Helen Franklin left England. In Prague, working as a translator, she has found a home of sorts—or, at least, unpronounced sanctuary. 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. As such superstition has it, Melmoth hunts her prey through the ages, dooming those she captures to the damnation of timeless, itinerant solitude. To Helen it all seems the stuff of unenlightened fantasy.

But, unaware, as Helen wanders the cobblestone streets, she is being watched. And then Karel disappears . . .

Including an unforgettable cast of characters—among them Helen and her circle in contemporary Prague; a young woman in 1930s Cairo; a junior Ottoman bureaucrat during World War I; a child in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia; a young man caring for his severely ill brother in a Manila hospital; and a desperate refugee from central Africa, precariously seeking shelter in 2017 London—Sarah Perry’s breathtaking follow-up to The Essex Serpent is a haunting novel of Gothic dread and moral struggle, a masterpiece of suspense, reckoning, and incandescent midnight.

About the Author:

Sarah Perry is the internationally bestselling author of The Essex Serpent and After Me Comes the Flood. She lives in England.

About this edition

• Publisher: Custom House
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0062856391
• ISBN 13: 9780062856395
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288