The Essex Serpent

The Essex Serpent is a novel to relish: a work of great intelligence and charm, by a hugely talented author -- Sarah Waters
Had Charles Dickens and Bram Stoker come together to write the great Victorian novel, I wonder if it would have surpassed The Essex Serpent? No way of knowing, but with only her second outing, Sarah Perry establishes herself as one of the finest fiction writers working in Britain today. -- John Burnside
A big, warm, generous novel that wears its considerable wisdom lightly, The Essex Serpent is an absolute pleasure from start to finish - I truly didn't want it to end. -- Melissa Harrison
The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry [is] a joyous and beguiling book that wrapped itself around me rather like its eponymous monster. -- Cathy Rentzenbrink
A blissful novel of unapologetic appetites, where desire and faith mingle on the marshes, but friendship is the miracle. Sarah Perry has the rare gift of committing the uncommittable to prose - that is to say: here is a writer who understands life. -- Jessie Burton
A book to make you want to be a better person. -- Justine Jordan, The Guardian
I loved this book. At once numinous, intimate and wise, The Essex Serpent is a marvellous novel about the workings of life, love and belief, about science and religion, secrets, mysteries, and the complicated and unexpected shifts of the human heart - and it contains some of the most beautiful evocations of place and landscape I've ever read. It is so good its pages seem lit from within. As soon as I'd finished it I started reading it again. -- Helen MacDonald
A sinuous historical novel by the genius that is Sarah Perry -- Lucy Mangan * Stylist *
An historical novel with real depth ... Perry writes fantastically, and this deserves attention for the rest of the year. -- Steven Cooper * The Bookseller *
One day this book will make a fine BBC period drama ... Perry is a wonderful descriptive writer with a remarkable talent for making the familiar strange ... Her accounts of open-heart surgery carried out half a century before antibiotics, or an autistic child questioning the nature of sin, or a soldier's wedding in the phthisic slums of Bethnal Green, snatch the breath in your throat. Perry bleeds light into darkness and back again with a mastery born of her deep professional acquaintance with the gothic tradition. -- Oliver Moody * Times *
The Essex Serpent is a work of historical fiction, set in the 1890s, which, for originality, richness of prose and depth of characterisation is unlikely to be bettered this year ... a remarkable novel. Although Will and Cora provide the focal points for her story, Perry has packed The Essex Serpent with a rich array of equally rounded characters to hold our attention. The novel is full of vivid set pieces ... it is Perry's ability to conjure up a sense of entire lives unfolding before our eyes that is most impressive. Filled with wisdom about human behaviour and motivations, and written in a distinctive, stylish prose, The Essex Serpent is one of the most memorable historical novels of the past decade. -- Nick Rennison * Sunday Times *
One for the holiday suitcase. A historical romance with a gothic twist ... expect to spot a copy on beach towels this summer. * Vogue *
An irresistible novel that taps the vein of Victorian gothic and British myth * Daily Telegraph *
It's prompted comparisons to both Dickens and Bram Stoker and marries the former's abhorrence of injustice with the latter's genius for unsettling atmosphere ... Hardy-esque ... a rich and complex novel but also a deeply enjoyable read, with warm humanity at its core. -- Jeff Robson * iPaper *
An irresistible novel ... Perry's Victoriana is the most fresh-feeling I can remember ... Her prose is often beautiful ... the tone is a masterstroke ... You feel the influences of Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Hilary Mantel channelled by Perry in some sort of Victorian séance. This is the best new novel I've read in years. It's the kind of work that makes you alive to the strangeness of the world and of our history. -- Charlotte Runcie * Daily Telegraph *
Engaging ... On the book's cover, John Burnside compares The Essex Serpent to Dickens and Stoker. But it was one of my favourite novels, Alasdair Gray's Poor Things (1992), that kept coming back to me ... Perry takes apart our preconceptions of prim Victorian mores with similar gusto ... The Essex Serpent is a historical novel with an entirely modern consciousness, and is every bit as gripping and unusual as its predecessor. -- Alex Preston * FT *
The Essex Serpent is frightfully good. -- Susan Hill * Twitter *
An intelligent, lushly written gothic yarn ... Reading it makes you want to hotfoot it to the Essex coast. -- Claire Allfree * Metro *
Everything they're saying is true: sumptuous, beautiful, powerful, engrossing, brilliant. -- Nina Stibbe * Twitter *
A lovely book ... it sets out unashamedly to lift the spirits ... The writing has a gorgeous lilt ... The method is itself Victorian - an omniscient narrator scattering sackfuls of sympathy - but the message never gets old: the world is poorer if we don't put ourselves in each other's place once in a while. -- Anthony Cummins * Spectator *
Sarah Perry's new novel The Essex Serpent is a thing of beauty inside and out. I don't think I've ever mentioned a book's cover in a review before, but Peter Dyer's William Morris-inspired design is stunning, a tantalizing taste of the equally sumptuous prose that lies within ... When it comes to historical fiction, Perry's achieved the near impossible; she's created a novel and within it a world that seems to have sprung complete and fully formed directly from the period in question - a long lost fin-de-siècle Gothic classic - but her characters are as enticingly modern as they are of their period ... Perry also showcases the most beguiling evocations of landscape ... For only a second novel it's a stunning achievement, one for which I predict prize nominations galore, from the Wellcome to the Man Booker -- Lucy Scholes * Independent online *
A richly themed and exhilarating novel ... this poetically written story dramatises the clash between rationality and resurgent superstition, between desire, morality and the intellect, and the struggle of reformers to redress the poverty of late-Victorian society. -- Elizabeth Buchan * Daily Mail *
Sarah Perry has written an exquisitely absorbing, old-fashioned page-turner peopled by memorable characters, particularly the magnificent, stubborn and wilful Cora. Perry also captures a society on the brink of a profound shift, uncomfortably reassessing its view of the world through the prism of scientific progress. The Essex Serpent is shot through with such a vivid, lively sense of the period that it reads like Charles Dickens at his most accessible and fans of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell will also find much to love in this engaging, entertaining Gothic novel. -- Charlotte Heathcote * Daily Express *
A novel of ideas, and flexes its muscles in addressing multiple concerns of the period ... The novel probes at both private emotion and public concerns, and is engrossing and immersive. The grime of London is only surpassed by the murk of Aldwinter. Cora makes for an indelible heroine: uncompromising, funny and smart, and not unlike Alma Whittaker in Elizabeth Gilbert's The Signature of All Things. There will also be whispers of Dickens or a gamut of 19th century novels of similar size and scale, but Perry's voice and story are her own. Her language is exquisite, her characterisation finely tuned. Based on The Essex Serpent and its predecessor, it's clear that Perry is a gifted writer of immense ability. -- Sinéad Gleeson * Irish Times *
A Victorian-era gothic with a Dickensian focus on societal ills, Perry's second novel surprises in its wonderful freshness. There's a sense of Llareggub about close-knit Aldwinter, its flint church, historic oak and ribby shipwreck instantly present, while the tapestry of voices that results from the use of letters amplifies the Under Milk Wood echo. Perry's singular characters are drawn with a fondness that is both palpable and contagious, and the beautifully observed changing seasons permitted space to breathe, all making for pure pleasure. -- Stephanie Cross * Observer *
An eerie tale of science and superstition ... gothically good. -- Eithne Farry * Sunday Express *
It's 1893, and Cora Seabourne is a young widow whose husband's death has released her from a miserable marriage. Finally free to follow her own interest in natural history, Cora heads to Essex, hoping the recent reports of a mysterious ancient serpent may possibly turn out to be proof of a "living fossil . . . a species outwitting extinction". There she meets the local vicar, Will Ransome, and despite his scepticism about science and her lack of faith in religion, the two forge an unlikely bond. A bewitching and luminous book about science, faith and different kinds of love. -- Anna Carey * Irish Times *
Dazzling * Woman and Home *
The Essex Serpent is rare in being a novel that is both highly diverting and intellectually rewarding, in taking its thematic interests seriously while playing delightedly with romance and the Gothic. -- Sarah Moss * The Lancet *
Sarah Perry...beautifully and deeply...elucidates friendships of all kinds in her books...I must recommend the delicate beauty and sinuous power. -- Lucy Mangan * Stylist *
It's a brilliantly written story of one woman's life and relationships in late Victorian England and my favourite historical novel since Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger. -- John Meagher * Irish Independent *
A graceful and intelligent book. -- Maria Croce * Daily Record *
The Essex Serpent is probably the best novel I have read this year. It is the right kind of literary fiction: full of ideas, challenge, and intrigue, but with a compelling narrative that tows you through the pages like a freight train...Perry has created an ensemble of characters so richly drawn that each could warrant a novel in his or her own right...invigorating, fascinating, and hugely enjoyable. -- Malcolm Doney * Church Times *
My stand-out novel of the year is The Essex Serpent...It's about love, faith and myth. I loved it. -- Jenni Murray * Radio Times *
The eponymous serpent makes its presence felt throughout, but this novel is about much, much more than a winged demon terrorising the Essex countryside, and is all the richer for it. -- Kate Foley * Living North *
One of the most-loved books of the last two years...Perry's descriptions of Essex bring to life the beauty of one of our more under-appreciated counties. * Emerald Street *
The Essex Serpent has been hailed as a modern classic, and for good reason. It's an esoteric, whimsical book that joins the ranks of generations of Victorian and Gothic novels from Doyle to Shelley, all the while defying the very traditions these books have set down... The perfect book to read as you sit in an overgrown garden, or while tramping through the heath. * The Edinburgh Reporter *
A Notable Book of 2017 * New York Times *