Book of the Week: ENLIGHTENMENT by Sarah Perry

Sarah Perry’s new novel explores conjunctions of love, faith, and science, as her characters are pulled together, apart, and together again, moved by forces as inexorable as those that underlie the bodies they observe astronomically. What constitutes freedom in this world, and what releases us into the wonder that is our own existence? “Extraordinary and ambitious. 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.” —Observer

• Find out more about the book.

• A taxonomy of love.

• The echo never fades.

• Meaning, ritual, and ambiguity.

• Orbits, collisions, and cosmic ellipses.

• Sex, God, and celestial bodies.

• The sublime and the ordinary.

• Happiness.

• Books by Sarah Perry.

• Other books long-listed for the 2024 Booker Prize.