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 to explore the world beyond their small Baptist community. It is two romantic relationships that will rend their friendship, and in the wake of this rupture, Thomas develops an obsession with a vanished nineteenth-century astronomer said to haunt a nearby manor, and Grace flees Aldleigh entirely for London. Over the course of twenty years, by coincidence and design, Thomas and Grace will find their lives brought back into orbit as the mystery of the vanished astronomer unfolds into a devastating tale of love and scientific pursuit. Thomas and Grace will ask themselves what it means to love and be loved, what is fixed and what is mutable, how much of our fate is predestined and written in the stars, and whether they can find their way back to each other.
Absorbing and affecting ... Thanks to the economical grace and emotional force of Ms. Perry’s writing, we are also held fast by other crises, inserted like tiny detonators in her narrative. Death and desolation, though all too familiar, are freshly affecting ... A novel of ideas, however, as well as one of emotion ... It is hard to think of another modern novelist who portrays religious faith with such intelligent sympathy.
Abundant ... Has a lot to say about God, goodness and celestial bodies. It’s told from a celestial height by an orotund if unnamed narrator, who moves fluidly among the points of view of at least half a dozen characters ... To quote the very British Basil Fawlty, 'Too much of a good thing always leaves one wanting less, I always find.'
Novels are time machines: their work is the measuring of events through time. 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.
