Enlightenment

Perry's Booker-longlisted novel follows Thomas Hart and Grace Macaulay, decades apart in age but bound by their shared, uneasy relationship to a small Essex Baptist congregation, over twenty years marked by astronomy, a vanished 19th-century woman, and a comet's return. The structure resists linear resolution deliberately — Perry is more interested in how faith, longing, and scientific wonder can occupy a person simultaneously than in plotting a conventional mystery to its solution. Reviewers have responded to the way she uses astronomy as a metaphor without forcing it: the same instinct that drives someone to search the sky for meaning is the one that drives religious devotion, and Perry lets both sit unresolved. It's a patient, interior novel that rewards slow reading.