Enlightenment
A Novel
-
-
4.1 • 13 Ratings
-
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR, Telegraph, Washington Post, The New Yorker. LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE.
“Like A.S. Byatt’s Possession, Enlightenment is a baroque, genre-bending novel of ideas, ghosts and hidden histories. A richly layered epic....a heartfelt paean to the consolations of the sublime, where religion and science meet." -- Telegraph
"Read it, then read it again. This is a book full of unexpected wonders." -- Literary Review
From the author of The Essex Serpent, a dazzling novel of love and astronomy told over the course of twenty years through the lives of two improbable best friends.
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 commitment to religion and their desire to explore the world beyond their small Baptist community.
It is two romantic relationships that will rend their friendship, and in the wake of this rupture, Thomas develops an obsession with a vanished nineteenth-century astronomer said to haunt a nearby manor, and Grace flees Aldleigh entirely for London. Over the course of twenty years, by coincidence and design, Thomas and Grace will find their lives brought back into orbit as the mystery of the vanished astronomer unfolds into a devastating tale of love and scientific pursuit. Thomas and Grace will ask themselves what it means to love and be loved, what is fixed and what is mutable, how much of our fate is predestined and written in the stars, and whether they can find their way back to each other.
A thrillingly ambitious novel of friendship, faith, and unrequited love, rich in symmetry and symbolism, Enlightenment is a shimmering wonder of a book and Sarah Perry’s finest work to date.
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.
Customer Reviews
What can I say . . .?
Five stars or four—better to err on the positive side. This book bewildered me—that's a compliment. It was a hard read because I reread so very many sentences, not because I didn’t understand them, but because I did and they took my breath away. I didn’t want to miss a tittle. Never one to rush through a book, I labored, reread over and over—and that's a sort of metaphor for a theme running just beneath Enlightenment's surface—the reiteration of life, perhaps of the cosmos. I loved the characters, except maybe a couple of them, but they can be forgiven, must be forgiven—another theme drifting throughout. I can’t describe the book better than that, except to say I loved it and hated it at the same time—yet another sub-theme, repeated. I wanted to finish it, but it kept making me not want it to end. So I savored each word and dragged it out as long as I could. What's time anyway? The “plot” seems elusive but so is the entire book . . . as is just about everything in all the universes . . . all the time.