Excerpt from Melmoth by Sarah Perry, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

'Well, then,' says Albína, retreats into her own hot, dense little den, and slams the door. Well! Reprieve, and a quiet evening, and in her satchel the Hoffman document. Helen hangs her coat, places her boots beneath it, and makes a pot of weak black tea. This she carries into her room, and sets on the desk beside the sheaf of paper. She stands for a long moment alone on the small square of oatmeal carpet, by the light of the naked bulb. Is she uneasy, now? A little – a little: the flesh on her forearms grows chill, the hairs there lift, there is a slight dropping sensation in the cavity of her chest, as if her heart has paused before a hasty beat. It is as if she feels a pair of eyes fixed on her, unblinking, calculating; she turns, and there is only the dressing-gown on the hook, the satchel on the bed. Karel's disease is infectious, it seems: she recalls, with a little quickening of the heart, herself as a child, as a teenager, certain that she was in some way marked out – feeling, as the young so often do, that she could not possibly be as ordinary as she seemed. (There is something else, also, swiftly suppressed: the memory of a cold gaze passing at the nape of her neck, when she did what she ought not to have done.)

She sits at the desk and takes out the manuscript. That minute copperplate seems already familiar – appears, as she takes her reading glasses from their case, actually to dissolve upon the page, the ink reshaping itself into plainly printed English: sans serif, twelve-point type. She takes a sip of bitter tea, and begins to read.

Excerpted from Melmoth by Sarah Perry. Copyright © 2018 by Sarah Perry. Excerpted by permission of Custom House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.