The Essex Serpent is the kind of book that totally absorbs you. The descriptions are fantastic and I felt like I was really there. I enjoyed the book the most when Cora is in the village. I rooted for them, I loved them, I felt their pain and joy. I especially loved Cora, Will and Stella. Everyone is so real, so made of flesh and blood you could almost believe they were real people. I l love it when a writer makes me scratch my head and say ‘oh, I never knew that was going to happen’ or ‘blimey, that was a bit of a surprise’. The book is not what I was really expecting and it took turns I had no idea were coming. It took bloody ages to read this book, just because the pesky real world got in the way, how dare it! (Serpent’s Tail, 20 April 2017, first published, 418 pages, paperback, borrowed from my library) Told with exquisite grace and intelligence, this novel is most of all a celebration of love, and the many different guises it can take. Although they can agree on absolutely nothing, as the seasons turn around them in this quiet corner of England, they find themselves inexorably drawn together and torn apart. A fierce memoir of a mother’s murder, a daughter’s coming-of-age in the wake of immense loss, and her mission to know the woman who gave her life.

But Will sees his parishioners’ agitation as a moral panic, a deviation from true faith. Cora, a keen amateur naturalist is enthralled, convinced the beast may be a real undiscovered species. They meet as their village is engulfed by rumours that the mythical Essex Serpent, once said to roam the marshes claiming human lives, has returned. Cora is a well-to-do London widow who moves to the Essex parish of Aldwinter, and Will is the local vicar.

Set in Victorian London and an Essex village in the 1890’s, and enlivened by the debates on scientific and medical discovery which defined the era, The Essex Serpent has at its heart the story of two extraordinary people who fall for each other, but not in the usual way.

Sarah perry new book