Books like Sarah Perry

Like The Essex Serpent, Possession makes intellectual inquiry feel intensely erotic. Two modern scholars uncover a hidden connection between Victorian poets, and interpretation gradually becomes a form of intimacy. Byatt supplies letters, diaries and superb invented poetry, creating a past that feels discovered rather than reconstructed.

Winner of the Booker Prize, this is the rare literary puzzle whose ideas deepen rather than impede its emotional force. If Perry’s combination of wit, scholarship and ardour delighted you, Possession is indispensable.

Mason gives a single patch of Massachusetts earth the vivid presence Perry gives the Essex marshes. Across centuries, inhabitants come and go while trees, animals, fungi and human traces form a larger, stranger continuity. Scientific observation and ghostly suggestion coexist without either being reduced to metaphor or explanation.

Named one of The New York Times’s ten best books of 2023, North Woods is formally adventurous yet sensuous and inviting. Its deepest kinship with Perry lies in its ability to make landscape feel alive, watchful and beyond possession.

An English nurse arrives in rural Ireland to observe a girl who is supposedly surviving without food. Her task sounds straightforward: watch closely, expose deception, report the facts. Donoghue instead turns scrutiny into a tense moral encounter between empirical certainty, religious belief and the needs concealed beneath both.

This Giller Prize finalist has the pressure and clarity of a chamber drama. A reader who admired Perry’s refusal to caricature either science or faith will recognize the same ethical seriousness here—but sharpened into a gripping, claustrophobic novel that is almost impossible to put down.