The book’s focal point, though, is Perry’s network of relationships, not least the dynamic interplay between polar opposites Cora and William. James and the social woes that run deep in Dickens’ later works. “The Essex Serpent” mines the sensation novels of Wilkie Collins, the antiquarian ghost stories of M.R. More important, he is moved to confess his true feelings for her: “I seem to have learned you by heart.” Perry’s cast takes stock of a series of uncanny happenings - snatched animals, mysterious illnesses, phantom ships vanishings, drownings, “night-shinings.” Eventually, William concedes to Cora that there is a hostile force about. Chief among them are Luke Garrett, a brilliant if unconventional surgeon who is besotted with Cora Martha and her admirer George Spencer, a pair of socialists committed to improving living and working conditions in “the whole great grinding enterprise of London” and William Ransome, the local vicar who is appalled at the rumor of a “scarebeast” and the ease at which his parishioners have succumbed to “godless superstition.” Cora, a naturalist, becomes fascinated and sets out to learn more about this “living fossil.”Ĭora is the book’s protagonist and her perspective dominates, but around her Perry assembles other characters and rotates their points of view. She learns of “strange news” in the village of Aldwinter: The so-called Essex serpent, last seen in 1669, has resurfaced from the murk of the Blackwater estuary and killed a man. The result is a novel that triumphs on every level, whether in its rich, evocative prose or its authentic Victorian detail, its credible, multifaceted characters or its high-stakes drama.Ĭora Seaborne is a young widow who leaves behind London and the shadow of her overbearing husband by moving to the Essex coast with her “baffling boy” Francis and her companion Martha. Instead she tracks individual lives and connections, explores hearts and minds - specifically aching hearts and inquiring minds. Perry neither dabbles in Gothic horror nor dwells on a community in crisis. However, its simplified synopsis - an English village is terrorized by the return of a mythical monster - somewhat sells the book short.

But can it repeat its success with a new and wider reading public? Now the English author’s second novel has been published in America. It was in bookstores and book clubs, on bedside tables and library waiting lists. The book slithered its way to the top of the bestseller lists its sumptuous and suspenseful story coiled tightly around readers’ hearts. Last year in the United Kingdom, Sarah Perry’s “The Essex Serpent” won awards and acclaim.

The serpent of essex book