Perry, S: The Essex Serpent A Novel

"For originality, richness of prose and depth of characterization is unlikely to be bettered this year ... one of the most memorable historical novels of the past decade." - Sunday Times
"Irresistible... you can feel the influences of Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Hilary Mantel channeled by Perry in some sort of Victorian séance. This is the best new novel I've read in years." - Daily Telegraph
"Perry's achieved the near impossible...A thing of beauty inside and out... a stunning achievement." - The Independent
"An exquisitely absorbing, old-fashioned page-turner...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." - Daily Express
"A novel to relish: a work of great intelligence and charm, by a hugely talented author." - Sarah Waters
"The Essex Serpent is Sarah Perry's first book to come across the pond to us from Great Britain, and it is a corker...Even the most minor characters are filled with a particular life, light and love...one of the best, most memorable novels I have read in long years." - Daily Herald
"Astonishing...Perry's prose is rich, textured, and intricate...a thoughtful and elegant book about the human need for knowledge and love, and about the fears and desires we bury." - Vox
"Compulsive...narrative and voice coil together until it is very difficult to stop reading." - The Guardian
"Perry's second novel is a dazzling and intellectually nimble work of Gothic fiction." - San Francisco Gate
"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, author of At Hawthorn Time
"Sarah Perry's novel of 19th century England tackles big ideas...reversals and sharp darts of psychological insight combined with a sense of the substance and feeling of late 19th-century ideas in bloom make this a fine novel, both historical and otherwise." - Newsday
"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
"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
"Everything they're saying is true: sumptuous, beautiful, powerful, engrossing, brilliant." - Nina Stibbe
"Irresistible" - People (Book of the Week)
"Gloriously alive." - NPR