Sign-In
Cart
Enlightenment
Paperback
FantasyGeneral FictionLiterary Fiction
Publisher Price: $18.99
ISBN13: 9780063352629
Publisher: Mariner Books
Published: Jun 10 2025
Pages: 384
Weight: 0.60
Height: 1.00 Width: 5.20 Depth: 7.90
Language: English
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 and character-driven 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 historical mystery surrounding 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 literary fiction 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 philosophical 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.
2 different editions
Also available
Also from
Perry, Sarah
Eight Ghosts: The English Heritage Book of New Ghost Stories
Perry, Sarah
Hurley, Andrew
Haddon, Mark
Paperback
Also in
General Fiction
Elizabeth Spencer: Novels & Stories (Loa #344): The Voice at the Back Door / The Light in the Piazza / Knights and Dragons / Stories
Spencer, Elizabeth
Hardcover
Anniversaries, Volume 2: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl, April 1968-August 1968
Johnson, Uwe
Paperback
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts
Plath, Sylvia
Paperback
Selected Writings: Robert Musil: Young Torless, Three Women, the Perfecting of a Love, and Other Writings
Musil, Robert
Agee, Joel
Paperback