Enlightenment
A beautiful summer read about love, mystery and unlikely friendship from the #1 Sunday Times bestselling author
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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.
