Sarah Perry interview: ‘Every writer can learn from the plotting of a good crime novelist’

The author of Enlightenment, longlisted for the Booker Prize 2024, shares the childhood memory that inspired her latest book, and her admiration for the ‘faultless’ novel by J.L. Carr

Read interviews with all of the longlisted authors here.

Published August 15, 2024

The inspirations behind my Booker-longlisted book

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.

The book that made me fall in love with reading

I was brought up surrounded by books, so my childhood memories seem almost to be mostly about reading. One memory stands out above all others: my father gave me a copy of Tess of the D’Urbervilles when I was 10, and I remember where I was sitting when my heart broke as the black flag was raised above the prison where Tess was being held. That was when I understood the full power of fiction: that it can move a reader just as much as a real event. I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since.

The book that made me want to become a writer

When I was a child, Alan Garner made me want to write. But later – when I was old enough to really understand what that meant – it was Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day that fixed my path. When I read it at 17, novels became something to which I wanted to devote my life. Until then I’d mostly read the classics: great literature seemed to me something done by dead women and men. But Ishiguro was alive – it was all happening now, and I wanted to be part of it.

Book cover of The Remains Of The Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, depicting a ticking clock. — *The Remains Of The Day* by Kazuo Ishiguro

The book I return to time and time again

I rarely re-read fiction, especially if characters have died. That feels like attending a funeral. But I’ve re-read The Rings of Saturn many times, and once stood at an exhibition of W.G. Sebald’s manuscripts inexplicably weeping at the sight of his handwriting annotating his translator’s work. There is something about the deep, melancholy music of the prose, the ranging and humane intelligence, and the mischief of Sebald’s playfulness with fact and fabulation, that exemplifies everything I think literature can achieve.

The book I can’t get out of my head

I recently read the Irish novelist Caoilinn Hughes’ The Alternatives, which is set in contemporary Ireland and features four brilliant, tricky sisters navigating their relation to the world and each other. I’m generally dazzled by her capacities as a novelist but I’m always especially struck by writers who display skills I fear I lack – and as well as being a great prose stylist and deep thinker Hughes is blissfully, effortlessly funny: I envy her!

The book that changed the way I think about the world

I’ll never forget reading Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black for the first time. It was a bright and sunny day, and I was sitting cross-legged in the long grass – but that book began to alter first my mood and then the world around me. Everything seemed to become darker, with things lurking at the edges – even the heat of the sun seemed hellish. It is fiction that seems to re-shape reality.

J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country is faultless in every respect

The book that changed the way I think about the novel

Here I return to Sebald, and The Emigrants. The gravity, precision and authority of the prose had tricked me into thinking I was reading a work of non-fiction, and it wasn’t until I went to seek out the works of the character who is a painter that I realised I’d been fooled. I was delighted: I understood then that the novelist is absolute master of the work, and can do as they please with fact and fiction, and the border between the two – and is perfectly at liberty to deceive the reader.

The book that impressed me the most

J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country is faultless in every respect. It is one of the few novels that I will read, and re-read. It is, for me, almost supernatural in its achievement – to bring the whole pity and horror of the Great War down to a solitary man restoring a fresco in an English church ought to be impossible: but there it is.

The book I’m reading at the moment

I tend not to read much fiction when I’m writing – and I worked on Enlightenment for six years, so I have a lot of catching-up to do. I’m currently reading Tessa Hadley’s The Past, and coming increasingly to love her elegant prose and canny eye on human relations. Next comes Percival Everett’s Wounded; but I am also working my way down a pile of Barbara Vine novels. Every writer can learn from the plotting and narrative skills of a good crime novelist.

The Booker-nominated book everyone should read

I’m always amazed that Edward St Aubyn has not – yet! – won the Booker prize. The last novel in his peerless Melrose series of novels, Mother’s Milk, was shortlisted in 2006, and concludes one of the great masterpieces of British contemporary literature. Mother’s Milk, like all the Melrose novels, is a stunning work – St Aubyn is capable of sustaining this elegant and controlled prose style while excavating the most distressing and depraved nooks of human consciousness and behaviour: I admire him as much as any living novelist.