Sarah Perry & Helen Macdonald: Enlightenment

At a Bethesda Baptist chapel two worshippers, separated in age by three decades, are drawn together by common interests, driven apart by divergent loves, before being reunited by the mysteries surrounding their small town. Francis Spufford describes Enlightenment (Jonathan Cape) as ‘a book in which everything is kindled into light by Sarah Perry’s rapt, luminous attention: friendship, betrayal, faith, astronomy, the drizzle on the streets of Essex and the heavens above them.’

Sarah Perry, author of Essex Girls, Melmoth and The Essex Serpent, was at the shop reading from the novel and talking about it with nature writer and novelist Helen Macdonald.