En smakebit på søndag: The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry

Mari på bloggen Flukten fra Virkeligheten hjälper oss att bjuda varandra på smakbitar ur de böcker vi läser just nu. Alltid kul att få lite boktips och lite försmak. Inga spoilers! Se andras smakbitar för dagen HÄR! 

Just nu läser jag The Essex Serpent av Sarah Perry. Det här är en historisk roman som stått inför/vunnit många bokutmärkelser. 

Om boken kan man läsa:

Set in Victorian London and an Essex village in the 1890's, and enlivened by the debates on scientific and medical discovery which defined the era, The Essex Serpent has at its heart the story of two extraordinary people who fall for each other, but not in the usual way.
They are Cora Seaborne and Will Ransome. Cora is a well-to-do London widow who moves to the Essex parish of Aldwinter, and Will is the local vicar. They meet as their village is engulfed by rumors

 that the mythical Essex Serpent, once said to roam the marshes claiming human lives, has returned. Cora, a keen amateur naturalist is enthralled, convinced the beast may be a real undiscovered species. But Will sees his parishioners' agitation as a moral panic, a deviation from true faith. Although they can agree on absolutely nothing, as the seasons turn around them in this quiet corner of England, they find themselves inexorably drawn together and torn apart.

På fler ställen på nätet, HÄR och HÄR, exempelvis, kan man läsa introt i boken (och i andra länken även första kapitlet).  Här kommer min smakbit, ur bokens inledande text:

Winter comes like a blow to the back of his neck: he feels it penetrate his shirt and go into his bones. The good cheer of drink is gone, and he’s comfortless there in the dark – he looks for his coat, but clouds hide the moon and he’s blind. His breath is slow, the air is full of pins; the marsh at his feet all at once is wet, as if something out there has displaced the water. Nothing, it’s nothing, he thinks, patting about for his courage, but there it is again: a curious still moment as if he were looking at a photograph, followed by a frantic uneven motion that cannot be merely the tug of the moon on the tides. He thinks he sees – is certain he sees – the slow movement of something vast, hunched, grimly covered over with rough and lapping scales; then it is gone.