After Me Comes the Flood
A Novel
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3.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $1.99
Publisher Description
From the internationally bestselling author of The Essex Serpent—soon to be an Apple TV+ Series
“A beautiful, dream-like, unsettling narrative in which every word, like a small jewel, feels carefully chosen, considered and placed. Rarely do debut novels come as assured and impressive as this one.”—Sarah Waters, New York Times bestselling author of The Paying Guests
Elegant, sinister and psychologically complex, After Me Comes the Flood is the haunting debut novel by Sarah Perry, the bestselling author of The Essex Serpent and Melmoth.
One hot summer’s day, John Cole decides to shut his bookshop early, and possibly forever, and drives out of London to see his brother. When his car breaks down on an isolated road, he goes looking for help and finds a dilapidated house. As he approaches, a laughing woman he’s never seen before walks out, addresses him by name and explains she’s been waiting for him. Entering the home, John discovers an enigmatic clan of residents all of whom seem to know who he is, and also claim they have been awaiting his arrival. They seem to be waiting for something else, too—something final....
Written before Sarah Perry’s ascension to an internationally bestselling author, After Me Comes the Flood is a spectacular novel of obsession, conviction, and providence.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Melmoth author Perry's eerie, peculiar latest (first published in the U.K. in 2014), an anxious London bookshop owner assumes a new identity among a set of mentally disturbed strangers. After feeling oppressed by the summer heat, John Cole closes up the shop and decides to visit his brother in Norfolk. On the way, John gets lost and suffers a panic attack, his car breaks down, and then, following a path through the forest, he discovers a house full of people who claim they have been awaiting his arrival. Initially unable to admit he's not the "Jon Coules" they'd been expecting, he finds himself captivated by the group of old friends particularly Eve and Alex, both in their 20s who know each other from their past stays at St. Jude's psychiatric ward. Hester, the mischievous, much older ringleader, vows to help the others improve themselves, while Alex, alarmed by anonymous letters he's received about a nearby dam, takes dangerous nightly swims to check for signs of impending floods. Over the week spent at the house, John's lust for Eve grows and he settles into his borrowed identity as Coules, and Perry teases out questions of sanity, love, and faith. Though the slow pace will test readers' patience, the novel succeeds in building a strange world in the English woods. Perry's fans will want to take a look.
