Enlightenment
A beautiful summer read about love, mystery and unlikely friendship from the #1 Sunday Times bestselling author
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4.0 • 6 Ratings
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
Unlikely best friends Thomas and Grace are bound together by questions of faith, love and astronomy in this dazzling summer read from the #1 bestselling author.
READERS HAVE FALLEN IN LOVE WITH ENLIGHTENMENT:
‘Vibrates with wonder’
‘I absolutely loved it’
‘Full of magic’
‘Exquisite…strange and wonderful and unpredictable’
‘This book tore my heart apart then put it back together again’
Thomas Hart and Grace Macaulay have lived all their lives in the small Essex town of Aldleigh. Though separated in age by three decades, the pair are kindred spirits – torn between their religion and their desire to explore the world. But their friendship is ruptured by the arrival of love.
Over the course of twenty years, Thomas and Grace will find their lives brought back into orbit as a devastating story of passion and scientific adventure unfolds and Aldleigh’s unique mysteries are revealed.
‘It’s glorious… A beautiful, memorable novel’ OBSERVER
‘Sarah Perry just gets better and better’ INDEPENDENT
‘Absorbing… A romance worthy of Emily Brontë’ WALL STREET JOURNAL
‘Gorgeous…ethereal’ GUARDIAN
‘Sarah Perry creates worlds to disappear into… Beautiful, vivid’ BBC
*LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2024*
*A BOOK OF THE YEAR FOR THE GUARDIAN, DAILY TELEGRAPH AND DAILY MAIL*
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
How do you follow a book like The Essex Serpent? Well, by heading back to the Home Counties (but this time in the late 1990s) for a 20-year story of unlikely friendship, astronomy and affairs of the heart. Like her bestseller, Enlightenment sees Sarah Perry meditate upon themes around the interplay and clash of science and religion, and characters struggling to fit into the society but there’s a stunning tenderness to the writing of her two leads that marks this book out. Local newspaper columnist Thomas and sixth-form student Grace are 30 years apart in age, but both members of the same Essex baptist church, and find themselves drawn to the case of a 19th-century astronomer, Maria Veduva, who mysteriously disappeared. Perry beautifully captures the pair’s heartbreaking romantic lives and delights with the parallels she draws between the cosmos, church and earthly pleasures.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Perry's enchanting latest (after The Essex Serpent) blends a ghost story with a meditation on astronomy and loneliness anchored on the periodic reappearances of Halley's Comet. Thomas Hart, a columnist for the small-town Essex Chronicle in 1997 England, is fascinated by the story of Maria Văduva, a resident of the historical Lowlands House whose unexplained disappearance nearly a century before may have fueled the legend of a ghost that haunts its premises. In a parallel narrative, Perry reveals Maria to have been an amateur astronomer. Her unrequited romance with a mysterious man during the same period when she discovered a comet, which fascinates Thomas when he reads their letters, echoes thematically in the 1997 story line with Thomas's memories of his secret love for a happily married man two years earlier, during the passing of Comet Hale-Bopp. Over the next 20 years, through the reappearance of Halley's Comet and the return of Maria's comet, Thomas comes to appreciate that the laws governing heavenly bodies—their recurring orbits, trajectories, and gravitational pulls—are possible templates for the eccentricities of human behavior. Perry's affection for her characters, even in their most flawed moments, adds to the fullness of their realization, as she makes it abundantly clear that the faults and frailties that distinguish them lie not in the stars but in themselves. Perry magnificently evokes the wonder of the cosmos.
