Something Severed, and Something Joined 
 Then it carried me in spate to the Essex shore, to all the marsh and shingle, and I tasted on my lips the salt air which is also like the flesh of oysters, and I felt my heart cleaving, as I felt it there in the dark wood on the green stair and as I feel it now: something severed, and something joined. 
 This is from a letter written near the end of this miracle of a novel by its heroine, a young widow named Cora Seaborne. It is an extension of her earlier remark about the diametrically opposite meanings of the word cleave: to cleave to something, to be cleft from something. She has a specific context: her feelings for a man whose views are often utterly opposed to her own, who is unavailable to her, yet whom she cannot live without. But it might well be a phrase that Sarah Perry had pinned to her wall while writing. Starting off like a period romance (the year is 1893), her novel continually surprises the reader with its emotional twists and turns, and its avoidance of formulaic outcomes; the bonds are not formed easily. It is a remarkably Protean book, containing a wide range of characters and ideas. The separation of people, places, and beliefs is a kind of leitmotif; the miracle is that Perry nonetheless manages to unite them all into a balanced and deeply satisfying whole. 
 He drew in a breath and all the seasons were in it: spring greenness in the grass, and somewhere a dog-rose blooming; the secretive scene of fungus clinging to the oak, and underneath it all something sharper waiting in a promise of winter. 
 One unifying factor is the book's structure, told month-by-month over the course of almost a full year. And anchored to the same place: the southeast coast of Essex, where the Blackwater River flows through woodlands and then out over desolate salt flats to the sea. Each month begins with a passage of nature writing deeply rooted in the great British pastoral tradition, but clearly written by someone who has lived in this landscape from childhood on; children's discoveries in fact play a significant part in the novel. Each of these chapters then continues with a bird's-eye view of what each of the main characters is doing, in their various parts of Essex or in distant London. The author has a second way to punctuate the detailed narrative of the intervening chapters: through the inclusion of letters. In other hands, this device might be a bore, but Perry has both a perfect feel for late-19th-century epistolary style and a knack for using it to convey character. Here, for instance, is how the local vicar's wife ends her invitation to Cora for an overnight stay: 
 PS--As you see, I could not resist sending you a primrose, though I was too impatient to press it well, and it has stained the page. I never could learn to bide my time! S. 
 By such natural means--the oneness of nature and the warmth of human connection between her many characters--Sarah Perry draws the many disparate elements in her story together. 
 And the lines of cleavage? Between science and superstition, religion and rationalism, socialism and the status quo. Cora has two principal male friends, very different. One is Luke Garrett, a socially awkward but pioneering surgeon. The other is Will Ransome, Vicar of Aldwinter, the Essex estuary town to which Cora retires after the death of her abusive politician husband. She herself is more scientist than theologian, going out at all hours to hunt for fossils in the alluvial mud. Her son Francis, who would nowadays be considered on the spectrum, takes this collecting mania still further. Her companion Martha, Francis's former nurse, develops as a social activist, enlisting Cora's political connections to address the scandal of housing for the poor in London. Reverend Ransome, whose job involves the social welfare of his parishioners, though he is not closed to modern thought, takes a Bible-based approach. He is one of the most sympathetic (because complex and believable) portraits of a clergyman I have seen for some time, and his lovely but ailing wife Stella is more beautiful still. 
 Which brings me to the title. Perry encountered the Essex Serpent in a 17th-century pamphlet entitled Strange News out of Essex. It was thought to be some huge eel-like beast with wings, beak, and claws, that would surface out of the muddy Blackwater, blight the crops, and carry off unwary animals and children. In Perry's reincarnation, it still has the power to terrify even at the end of the 19th century. Cora, as a true Darwinist, hopes to prove that it is some vanished species. Will Ransome is sure that it must have some rational explanation, but he cannot deny the growing fear that grips his flock. His wife Stella sees it as a personal angel messenger, while Cora's son Francis merely observes the growing unease around him and keeps his own counsel. The Essex Serpent is a fictional notion only, but it serves as the nexus of a web of human reactions and interactions that are very real. 
 And very moving. This is my best book of the year so far.