I came to this novel some time after publication, when a friend gave me her copy. It's magnificent: it reads as if it was written in the Victorian era and the mysterious eponymous serpent and the troubles it causes and the psychological depths it plunges its characters down into are beautifully and brilliantly drawn: what is it that troubles them, really? The serpent's potential presence gets them searching their psyches, or not, but they all react to it: some with horror, Cora Seaborne (the protagonist) with scientific enquiry, some with fear, others with myth and magic and it's all grippingly and convincingly written. The novel is also a portrait of Victorian society: dreadful social housing; medical progess and experiment; a fascination with our ancestry, including our dinosaurian ancestry; relationships between men and women and how they weren't as buttoned as we've been led to believe, then; equality between men and women; reason versus religion. And the child characters were beautifully, realistically drawn.

I relistened to Sarah Perry's interview on Radio 4's Bookclub with James Naughtie and she's clearly fiercely intelligent and did much research, but the novel reads as if she didn't and that's a great trick.

A word of warning: in my opinion, the tv series doesn't do the novel any kind of justice. The Essex Serpent is the kind of novel (all the best novels are) that requires its readers to use their imaginations to conjure for themselves extra details of landscape, to amplify the characters' fears and to imagine what exactly it is that the characters are afraid of, using the writer's fine prose as a foundation from which all else springs. A tv adaptation (or a film) that provides all the images for us makes our imaginations lazy and so the story is far less immersively haunting.