After Me Comes the Flood: From the author of The Essex Serpent

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In actual fact, it soon becomes clear that there is a rather more ordinary (if unlikely) explanation for the group's embrace of John. John Burnside, After Me Comes the Flood by Sarah Perry review – a remarkable debut, The Guardian, 26 June 2014.

After Me Comes the Flood, Sarah Perry, Norwich

Who are these odd people and how can they have known Cole was coming when he doesn’t know who they are and found their house by accident? So, we do get character development and I actually liked the elements of mystery that remained around the characters.It seemed to me the most real and solid thing I'd ever seen, and at the same time only a trick of my sight in the heat”. S. for the first time, a man becomes lost in the woods only to be welcomed by a household of strange but passionate residents. However, while this is just being released in the US, it was actually written before Sarah Perry’s other works Melmoth and The Essex Serpent so I’m hopeful that it only gets better from here.

After Me Comes The Flood, by Sarah Perry - book review After Me Comes The Flood, by Sarah Perry - book review

Perry's Cora, on the other hand, is a substantial and fascinating woman, and the women in After Me Comes The Flood while representative of particular archetypes playing out their respective roles in an allegoricical tale, suggest more depth than what they are willing or able to reveal and so leave us with a sense of lingering interest and mystery. The house and its gaggle of misfits are full of mysteries and idiosyncracies, and there are hints of something sinister going on under the surface, waiting to be uncovered. The plot, too, is set up as the slow uncovering of a rather sad mystery but (again like The Essex Serpent) is both more and less than one expects, and yet its denouement feels inevitable and fits the overarching narrative like a kid glove.Apres moi, le deluge” (After me comes the flood) is an expression that was attributed sometimes to Louis XV, and other times to the Marquise de Pompadour. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. He or she was referring to the centuries of excessive living enjoyed by the aristocracy and paid for by the rest of France and what would happen as a result when His Majesty (or Madame) went to their heavenly rest.

After Me Comes the Flood by Sarah Perry | Waterstones

Skiba sings it in a kind of exasperated way like He's tired of hearing this negative view constantly and just allowing that person to continue feeling the way they feel knowing he can't do anything about it. Reading Sarah Perry's extraordinary debut novel, it is hard not to reach for comparisons, if only in a bemused attempt to work out just why this book is so very good. In the shimmering, oppressive heat - perfectly evoked - this seems laughably unlikely, yet a sense of dread remains and it is hard not to feel there is some impending doom awaiting them all.The line "so that the others may do" tells of something which must be done for others to follow suit. The sky, empty for thirty five days, was punctuated by a single cloud moving east, shedding white air at its fringes, as solitary as if puffed out of the chimney stack. Why does Eve make John feel "pain set up very low in his stomach…as if hooks had been pushed through his flesh"?