Sarah Perry – författare

En uppslukande roman som jämförts med Charles Dickens, Bram Stoker och Hilary Mantel och tagit Storbritannien med storm.

London 1893. Cora Seaborne är fortfarande ung men har just blivit änka, och nu förväntar sig omgivningen att hon ska snöra åt korsetten, klä sig i svart och dra sig tillbaka med en knähund i famnen. Men äktenskapet var inte särskilt lyckligt, och rollen som viktoriansk societetsfru passade aldrig den egensinniga och frihetstörstande Cora.

Hon bestämmer sig för att lämna storstaden för landsbygden i Essex, tillsammans med sin socialistiskt orienterade väninna Martha och sin mycket speciella son Francis. De hamnar i den lilla staden Colchester, där rykten om ett mystiskt odjur har skapat masshysteri hos lokalbefolkningen.

Coras teori är att det rör sig om en oupptäckt art som hon är fast besluten att hitta och klassificera. Hon finner en oväntad vän och intellektuell jämlike i traktens präst William Ransome. Tillsammans söker de svaret på gåtan, samtidigt som Will och Cora oundvikligen dras till varandra.

Etta på Sunday Times bästsäljarlista, belönad med det brittiska bokhandelspriset Waterstones Book of the Year och British Book Awards Overall Book of the Year och nominerad till en lång rad priser, däribland Costa Book Award och Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.

An unforgettable story of love, faith and science, Enlightenment is Sarah Perry's finest novel to dateThomas Hart and Grace Macauley are fellow worshippers at the Bethesda Baptist chapel 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 love.Thomas falls for James Bower, who runs the local museum. Together they develop an obsession with the vanished nineteenth-century female astronomer Maria Veduva, said to haunt a nearby manor, and whose startling astronomical discoveries may never have been acknowledged. Inspired by Maria, and the dawning realisation James may not reciprocate his feelings, Thomas finds solace studying the night skies. Could astronomy offer as much wonder as divine or earthly love?Meanwhile Grace meets Nathan, a fellow sixth former who represents a different, wilder kind of life. They are drawn passionately 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 the sheer miracle of being alive.

Now I understand there are no ordinary lives - that every death is the end of a single event in time's history: an event so improbable as to be miraculous, and irreplaceable in every particular.Sarah Perry's father-in-law, David, died at home nine days after a cancer diagnosis and having previously been in the good health. The speed of his illness outstripped that of the NHS and social care, so the majority of nursing fell to Sarah and her husband. They witnessed what happens to the body and spirit, hour by hour, as it approaches death.Death of an Ordinary Man is an unstinting account of death by cancer, a reportage into the daily experience of caring, an exploration of the structural conditions of dying in the UK, and most importantly a testament to David's life, that of an ordinary man.Unflinching and profoundly moving, Sarah Perry confronts the taboo surrounding death and shows us how to confront all of the terror and beauty that comes with the end of life - and how the saddest thing she has ever seen is also the best thing she's ever done.