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

And indeed there had been no use resisting. That weekend, Helen Franklin – who resisted pleasure and companionship as assiduously as a Trappist avoids conversation – was welcomed into an apartment where Thea stirred a copper pan on the stove, and Karel sat at a scrubbed table measuring the depth of a curve on a convex glass disc. He was, she discovered, attached to a university department, his subject that of the history of the manufacture of glass, and all its uses both domestic and industrial. 'It's a telescopic mirror,' he had said, greeting his visitor with very little interest, and no sign of abandoning his task, 'so the curve must be the depth of a parabola, and not a sphere.'

Helen took off her coat and gloves, and handed Thea a bottle of wine (which she herself would not drink). Then obeying a gesture from her host she sat at the table, and folded her hands in her lap. 'Tell me about it', she said.

'I am making a reflecting telescope,' he had said, 'grinding the mirror by hand, as Newton would have done, back in 1668.' He set down the glass and showed her his hands. They were rough, and looked sore; remnants of some white paste adhered beside the nails.

Thea put bread and butter on the table. She wore on a long silver chain a curious green pendant, rather like a flower cast in glass. The copper pan spat on the stove. 'He will never finish it.'

'The focal length,' said Karel, 'is half the radius of curvature.' He looked at Helen, who could not suppress her old pleasure in being taught, and listened with unfeigned interest as he explained his intention to create a mirrored surface by evaporating a layer of aluminium.

All that evening she watched her hosts. Thea, who had ten years on her partner, mothered and petted him – cuffed him, sometimes, if she felt he overstepped the mark ('Don't be nosy, Karel – let her keep her secrets!'). To Helen she was attentive and warm, though always with faint amusement, as if she found her guest odd, but not unpleasantly so. Karel, meanwhile, had an air of cultivated irony, of indifference, which slipped most when he was watching Thea, which he did with a kind of loving gratitude; or when treating Helen as if she were a pupil. Later Helen understood that his partner and his subject were really all that ever occupied his thoughts – that he was like a man who dines so well on the dishes he likes best that he has no appetite for anything else.

Helen – refusing wine; accepting only a very small portion of meat – said to Thea, 'Do you teach at the university too?'

'I am retired,' said Thea, with a smile anticipating Helen's protests that surely not – surely she was nowhere near retirement age.

'She was a barrister, back in England,' said Karel. He gestured to shelves that bowed beneath the weight of legal textbooks. 'She still keeps her horsehair wig, over there in a black tin box.' Then he said, with as much pride as if it had all been his own doing, 'She chaired a government inquiry, you know. Could have taken a title, if she'd wanted it.' He took her hand, and kissed it. 'My learned friend,' he said.

Thea offered Helen buttered potatoes in a porcelain dish. Seeing her guest decline – seeing the half-eaten food on her plate, and the few sips taken from her glass of water – she said nothing. 'It had been all work, and no pleasure,' she said. 'So I took a holiday in Prague, and that became a sabbatical, and that became a retirement. And then, of course, there was Karel.'

Karel accepted a kiss, then looked with disfavour at Helen's plate. It seemed he lacked his partner's tact: 'You're not hungry?' he said; and then, 'You're very quiet, I must say.'

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.