From the author of former Waterstones Book of the Year, The Essex Serpent, comes an intricately crafted exploration of love, religion and the supernatural, as two friends become obsessed with the ghost of a vanished nineteenth-century astronomer.
Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2024
Enlightenment is a story 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 for more. But their friendship is threatened by the arrival of romantic love.
Thomas falls for James Bower, who runs the local museum. Together they develop an obsession with the vanished nineteenth-century astronomer said to haunt a nearby manor, and whose identity might finally be revealed when a startling discovery is made. As Thomas fears a broken heart, he comes to find solace in astronomy: might it offer as much as earthly or even divine love? Meanwhile Grace meets Nathan, a fellow sixth former. They are drawn recklessly together, but quickly pulled apart, casting Grace into the wider world and far away from Thomas.
In time, the mysteries of Aldleigh are revealed, bringing Thomas and Grace back to each other and to a richer understanding of love, of the nature of the world and their place in it.
This ambitious novel about love and faith and science is Sarah Perry's finest work to date.
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
ISBN: 9781787334991
Number of pages: 400
Weight: 619 g
Dimensions: 242 x 161 x 37 mm
Enlightenment is a complete masterwork — ambitious, crafted, truly artful. With its intersections of faith, physics, love and wisdom, I imagine we will be quoting lines from the novel for years to come. It holds page after page of luminous prose, playful intelligence, storyteller’s wit and companionship, and the rarest compassion. Like the comets within, the reader travels headlong through the book’s darkness and beauty, alongside universal laws and mysteries, aligning with both human matter and spirit. Sarah Perry is an extraordinary maker, of unique mind, sensibility and gifts; her writing is, as ever, lit by sheer brilliance - Sarah Hall, author of The Electric Michelangelo
A book about grace, written with a faith in awe and in elemental love, Enlightenment is full of both ordinary and extraordinary wonders. Sarah Perry has brought all her wide empathy and joy to this novel: its characters are rich and vivid and tenderly human. Enlightenment is not only a book that seems to redeem its world, but to redeem its readers. It is a gift - Seán Hewitt, author of All Down Darkness Wide
A book in which everything is kindled into light by Sarah Perry’s rapt, luminous attention: friendship, betrayal, faith, astronomy, the drizzle on the streets of Essex and the heavens above them - Francis Spufford, author of Golden Hill
Once again Sarah Perry has gifted us with an ambitious story impeccably imagined in poignant prose; a beautifully nuanced novel of love in all its aspects, artfully marrying faith and science into something truly beguiling - Susan Stokes-Chapman, author of Pandora
Sarah Perry has the rare gift of committing the uncommittable to prose - that is to say: here is a writer who understands life - Jessie Burton, author of The Miniaturist
The Essex Serpent is one of the most memorable historical novels of the past decade - Sunday Times
Melmoth is one of the great achievements of our century - Observer
It’s glorious, doing what her books do best: intertwining a love story with reams of esoteric learning and big ideas… This is a beautiful, memorable novel - Observer, Books to Look Out For 2024*
Thomas Hart, a newspaper columnist from the Essex town of Aldleigh and young Grace Macauley are the main characters in this wonderful new novel by the talented writer of ‘Essex Serpent’.
They bond over their...
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This took me a little while to get into, but about fifty pages in I was hooked and read it in two sittings. It's a strange, unsettling book. Thomas is a man who lives a dual life. Mostly a sombre, God fearing man... More
At the heart of Enlightenment are two remarkable, unlikely friends like twin stars - Grace Macaulay, a precocious and unusual girl growing up in a world she wasn’t made for, and Thomas Hart, the older man who has... More
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