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Enlightenment by Sarah Perry
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Enlightenment

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Narrator Alex Jennings

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Length 13 hours 5 minutes
Language English
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Summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

Enlightenment is a story 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 for more. But their friendship is threatened by the arrival of romantic love.

Thomas falls for James Bower, who runs the local museum. Together they develop an obsession with the vanished nineteenth-century astronomer said to haunt a nearby manor, and whose identity might finally be revealed when a startling discovery is made. As Thomas fears a broken heart, he comes to find solace in astronomy: might it offer as much as earthly or even divine love? Meanwhile Grace meets Nathan, a fellow sixth former. They are drawn recklessly together, but quickly pulled apart, casting Grace into the wider world and far away from Thomas.

In time, the mysteries of Aldleigh are revealed, bringing Thomas and Grace back to each other and to a richer understanding of love, of the nature of the world and their place in it.

This ambitious novel about love and faith and science is Sarah Perry's finest work to date.

'Hugely talented'
SARAH WATERS, author of FINGERSMITH

'Here is a writer who understands life'
JESSIE BURTON, author of THE MINIATURIST

©2024 Sarah Perry (P)2024 Penguin Audio

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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 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 A genre-bending novel of ideas, ghosts and hidden histories... A heartfelt paean to the consolations of the sublime, where religion and science meet Expand reviews
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