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Enlightenment

A beautiful summer read about love, mystery and unlikely friendship from the #1 Sunday Times bestselling author

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Enlightenment

By: Sarah Perry
Narrated by: Alex Jennings
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Summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

Unlikely best friends Thomas and Grace are bound together by questions of faith, love and astronomy in this dazzling summer read from the #1 bestselling author.
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 religion and their desire to explore the world. But their friendship is ruptured by the arrival of love.
Over the course of twenty years, Thomas and Grace will find their lives brought back into orbit as a devastating story of passion and scientific adventure unfolds and Aldleigh’s unique mysteries are revealed.
‘It’s glorious… A beautiful, memorable novel’ OBSERVER
‘Sarah Perry just gets better and better’ INDEPENDENT
‘Absorbing… A romance worthy of Emily Brontë’ WALL STREET JOURNAL
‘Gorgeous…ethereal’ GUARDIAN
‘Sarah Perry creates worlds to disappear into… Beautiful, vivid’ BBC

©2024 Sarah Perry (P)2024 Penguin Audio

 Christian Fiction Friendship Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Romance Heartfelt Astronomy
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Critic Reviews

Gauzy and unhurried, a genteel novel of inner space. It’s luxuriously – defiantly – old-fashioned... Perry has always produced gorgeous prose, and she has found a new, ethereal register in this book
A genre-bending novel of ideas, ghosts and hidden histories... A heartfelt paean to the consolations of the sublime, where religion and science meet
A rich, surprising book that dazzles and dizzies the reader. It balances reason with belief, excels in both ideas and action, and, though firmly placed in Perry’s homeland of Essex, it’s a book with cosmic reach
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
Dazzling… Faith and science can inspire out-of-time cosmic wonder, but as Perry beautifully demonstrates here, so, too, can the novel
Tender, ruminative, philosophical
Sarah Perry just gets better and better… A fat, satisfying, grown-up novel – rich in plot, characters, ideas, structure, and atmosphere… It hangs together as a resplendent whole, shining like a night sky
Gorgeously written… A beautiful, compassionate and memorable book, one that will repay reading more than once
Perry has returned with another cracker. A dazzling novel, full of big ideas about religion and science, love and friendship
It’s glorious, doing what her books do best: intertwining a love story with reams of esoteric learning and big ideas… This is a beautiful, memorable novel
All stars
Most relevant
This book, is just another classic sign of how far the Booker Awards, (long and short lists), have fallen. One just has to tick all the right virtue boxes and you'll be running for a Booker award ... forget about actual literary talent. Even the prose and imagery, which started out ok, (but not fantastic), continually repeated itself ... obviously by a mediocre, unimaginative author shot to fame by ticking all the boxes, (as usual in lots literature of the last 15 years). When reading the outline, one would expect the story to be a bit quirky, and about astronomy and friendship. When in fact it was chiefly about women's suffrage, unrequited gay love, shallowly playing on stereotypes of the church, with the one straight male character being secondary and patronised with continual hints he was dull witted. This is not what I thought I was paying for, there was no hint of any of this in the book description ... and even these shallow virtue signalling ideas which I have read hundreds of times, over and over again, where here, poorly explored again, with only a few sentences in the whole book being good or illuminating. Basically, just another Booker rubbish book, standard slop. Ps: I am aware that this critic is sloppily written, but I am not an author.

Shallow, virtue signalling, utter garbage.

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