Excerpt from Melmoth by Sarah Perry, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

'Melmoth? No. I'd remember it, I think. Melmoth – not Czech, is it? Not quite English, either ...' She says the name a third time, and a fourth; as if it were some new thing placed upon her tongue which might well taste bitter. This has a curious effect on her companion; it seems to animate him, to cause an avid shining in the bruised sockets of his eyes.

'No, why would you: it meant nothing to me, a week ago – a week! Is that all!' There is again that unhappy laugh. 'Melmoth – she ...' his hands dabble on the sheets of paper with a curious action that puts Helen in mind of a man fretfully soothing a bad-tempered cat. 'D'you ever feel,' he says, 'the back of your neck prick – all the hairs lifting there – as if a cold wind had come into the room and hunted you out, and only you? It's nothing, you say to yourself – what's the English phrase – the goose walks over your grave? – but if you knew!' He shakes his head; lights another cigarette, draws deeply, stubs it out. 'It's no use. You wouldn't believe me, and would be foolish if you did – here: take this, take the letter.' He slips the typed sheet free from its paperclip. 'I'll get another drink (God knows I'll need it) and leave you to read – take it, go on, aren't you all curious, you women, always putting your ear to the door?'

Helen is poised between a dark sea and a certain shore. Karel has never, in the years she's known him, shown fear of any kind, nor any inclination towards superstition, or to giving credence to legend. The change that has come over him is nothing less than the change from mortality to immortality: it all at once occurs to her, as it never has before, that he'll die; that death already has its imprint on him, on the days he's not yet lived, like a watermark on empty sheets of paper. He is at the bar, leaning with a stoop to his shoulders that is all the more troubling for being unfamiliar. She thinks how tall he had seemed, how upright his bearing, when he first approached her in the library café, there having been no other tables free. 'May I?' he'd said in Czech, and not waited for her response, but having sat down turned his attention to some incomprehensibly complex diagram (intersecting circles; lines converging on a point), and to an apple pastry. Her own cup of black coffee, bitter and cold, was set beside a pamphlet which was she was translating from German into English at the fee of nine pence a word. They had looked, Helen felt, like a peacock and a sparrow; Dr Karel Pražan in a violet cashmere sweater, Helen Franklin in a cheap and colourless shirt. Certainly nothing more would have come of the encounter had Thea not arrived. Helen, looking up, had seen a woman of middle height and late middle years, standing with her hands in the pockets of woollen trousers with a deep hem, stooping to kiss Karel on the crown. Her hair was short and red; she smelt of cologne. She gave Helen a merry appraising look. 'Have you made a friend?' she said to Karel in English; and Helen had blushed, because the inflexion, if not precisely unkind, had been disbelieving. Karel looked up from his notebook and surveyed Helen with vague surprise, as if in the intervening minutes he'd forgotten she was there; then said swiftly in Czech that he was sorry to disturb her, and that they would leave her in peace.

Conscious of a desire to wrong-foot this elegant pair, Helen had said in English, 'Please don't go on my account: I'm leaving, anyway', and begun to return her work to her satchel.

Thea then had brightened, with the sudden blaze of delight which Helen later learned was characteristic of her ability to take pleasure at any time, from any source. 'Oh, but that accent – you have brought me home in my time of exile! London? Essex, perhaps? Stay, won't you – sit, let me bring more coffee – Karel, insist she stays – she is leaving, and I won't have it!' There had been then a look of understanding that passed between Karel and Helen – there is no use at all resisting, I'm afraid; it's all right, I quite understand – which was a surer footing for friendship than any Helen had felt for years.

Excerpted from Melmoth by Sarah Perry. Copyright © 2018 by Sarah Perry. Excerpted by permission of Custom House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.