Enlightenment

‘I’ve this vivid, moving memory of seeing Halley’s comet with my father in 1986, and I’ve loved the stars and comets ever since. But many years later, it turned out I never saw it: this memory was completely false. By then, I’d already begun a book about a small religious community in Essex, and a man moving out of faith into the wonder of the cosmos – but it was my mistaken love for Halley that provided a model for using the movement of the planets as an organising principle for interrogating human intimacy and love.’   

Read the full interview here.

‘There are some novels which set out to take time, that have a certain confidence in their pacing. Enlightenment does this splendidly. This long and quiet book brings together a compression of place – a small town in 1990s Essex – and an exhilarating exploration of the heavens, comets, faith, ghosts, love. The novel takes its main characters – a middle-aged novelist and reporter for a local paper and the 17-year-old daughter of the local pastor – and weaves a novel of great ambition. This is a book of deep pleasures, full of passion for the life of ideas, richly and satisfyingly written.’

Alex Preston, The Guardian

‘Novels are time machines: their work is the measuring of events through time. What Perry has done in this layered, intelligent and moving book is to construct a kind of quantum novel, one that asks us to question conventional linear narratives and recognise instead what is ever-present in Perry’s luminous vision of Essex: truth, beauty and love.’

John Self, Financial Times

‘At times Enlightenment recalls other writers who have trodden related ground: the erudition of AS Byatt, the ungovernable romances of Iris Murdoch. “Isn’t love goodness?” Grace asks, a line that could have come directly from the lips of a Murdoch hero. This is a novel that’s as happy talking essayistically about science — drawing on TS Eliot and Carlo Rovelli — as it is delivering impressive narrative scenes such as a fairground disaster, a recollection of the ravages of Aids. “I learned that there really are such things as the death rattle, that death will eat a man like a pack of wolves in the night.” Yet the peculiar intelligence driving the novel is all Perry’s own. Above all, Enlightenment is a book that doesn’t compromise, and is all the more interesting as a result.’

Kirkus

‘Swiftly sketched but fully realized secondary characters give the novel a social texture more commonly found in Victorian literature, an impression bolstered by Perry’s intricately layered prose. Much of the story is sad, but a radiant finale suggests reconciliation and renewal. Thoughtful, sensitive, and beautifully written.’

Publishers Weekly

‘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.’

Sarah McCraw Crow, BookPage

‘Many of Perry’s sentences are startlingly beautiful, creating an atmospheric sense of setting and character. If some of Enlightenment’s goings-on are a bit elliptical, and if some secondary characters feel a little wispy, not quite coming into focus, that too seems part of the novel’s aim and its charm.’