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 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 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 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 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.

The center of Enlightenment is the comet, an object in space that gets caught in the gravity of another and then periodically returns to its presence as a part of a long orbit. Perry puts this metaphor to serious work in the novel, building around it a story of characters who inexplicably appear and attract each before separating again. The central paternal relationship between Thomas Hart, the older newspaper correspondent, and Grace Macaulay, a young member of the fundamentalist church he attends is the heart of the novel, and all of us agreed that Perry does a terrific job describing this relationship in all of its caring and selfishness and mistakes. Thomas in particular is a terrific character in whom Perry has packed a fascinating history (as a largely closeted gay man living through the late 20th century), a complex set of desires, and believable contradictions. Thomas's potential relationship with James is a powerful arc of longing and self-reflection. Perry ties this relationship to a potential discovery of a comet by a woman over a hundred years earlier and Thomas and Grace's investigation into this story causes them to collide with other characters in profound ways. Perry's plot is moved forward in this way largely by coincidence and accident, where things as likely as talking to a homeless man or attending a carnival happen to cause people to reconnect or discover the next step of a mystery. For at least one of us, these plots were just too convenient to believe, but many of us felt that Perry had established that this was a universe of invisible connections so that contrivances didn't bother us. Similarly, there were a lot of secondary characters that some of us questioned the need for, but from the lens of comets (how comets fascinate humans, how comets escape orbit), the ones of us who liked the book could see how it hung together. Our overall feeling was that if you were ok with the unlikely ride Perry provided, you would really like this novel. There were just so many nice small touches and true motivations in the characters, coupled with some beautiful writing in places, that we largely would recommend Enlightenment to people who enjoyed Perry elsewhere. Give it a read and see if you get caught in its gravity.