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

He laughs then – shrugs – clears his plate. The boys in their workman's boots have gone; in the corner a student sits smoking over her books. Karel returns the sheaf of papers to its file, and the tremor has gone from his hands. 'All right,' he says. 'I'll tell you everything. That is: everything I have seen myself. The rest, we leave to Josef.' He glances at the file. 'And yes, he is dead.' There is a long, silent moment: each bows their head, a little foolishly, out of mere good manners. Then Karel lights a cigarette from the candle on the table, leans back against the painted wall beside the velvet curtain, and says: 'I met him first where I met you: in the library, in the morning, very early, a year ago at least ...'

Morning, very early, at least a year ago: the National Library of the Czech Republic at the Klementinum, and a kind light shining on the pale bell tower of the Jesuit college it once had been. Karel, on compassionate leave from Charles University, Thea having suffered her stroke, went daily to his library desk to escape his guilt and shame. The woman in the chair for which ugly ramps had been fitted in his home was not – he could not pretend otherwise – the woman with whom he'd passed a decade. Thea, who could hardly cross the road without acquiring a dinner companion, or someone with whom to attend the Black Light shows for which she had a child's love; Thea, with her look of someone you could not trust with a secret, but to whom you'd tell it anyway – this Thea had, he feared, been effaced. On the steel footplates of her wheelchair her well-shod feet turned weakly in; her capable hands lay listless in her lap, or fumbled at the pages of a book. Karel found himself unsuited to the task of carer, which had been always Thea's role: who was there now to pet Karel in his childish moods, when he must clean, and carry, and press analgesics and distalgesics and antiplatelets from their foil packets, and carry them to Thea on a saucer? He wept onto burnt toast, and wished the tears were more sorrowful than angry. Thea said, 'Oh get out, be off with you: do you think I need you under my wheels all day? Off to the library with you, and bring me something good to eat.' Released from his duties – relieved, and guilty at his relief – Karel went to the Klementinum from Monday to Saturday, sat himself at desk 220 as he always had, photographing, mumbling, taking notes; in the afternoons (these being her allotted hours for work) meeting Helen in the café for cakes filled with poppy-seed paste.

On perhaps the second week – spring indecently in bloom – his gaze was drawn by an elderly man seated across the cork-tiled aisle at desk 209. He could not later say what it was that had made him look – a sudden movement, perhaps? The sound of a pencil's frantic scratching? – only that for several minutes he could not look away. The man wore a heavy coat, despite fine weather, and sat very still save for the motion of his right hand, which crossed and crossed a sheet of paper in a fine copperplate. All around him students typed rapidly before their glowing screens, or sat with eyes turned upward listening secretly to music; but this man had brought a pot of ink into which he dipped his pen with mechanical regularity. Beside that pot, Karel saw, was one of the small square stones that pave the streets of Prague, and which often erupt at the footfall of too many passers-by, or at the upward press of a tree root; this he occasionally touched, without looking up from the page. Altogether the effect was of a breach in time through which Karel peered into some morning decades past: 'I'll hear horses' hooves on the streets outside!' he thought. The document on which the man worked looked very like an academic treatise, with lengthy footnotes appended here and there; sometimes he would read over what he'd written, and shaking his head with a sound of disgust tear the paper into strips, earning censorious looks from nearby scholars. The desk beside him was empty, but the lamp was lit; the old man seemed to have drawn the chair towards him, and if someone approached – hopefully clutching their books to their chest: 'May I?' – he raised his head, sternly shook it, and drew the chair a little nearer.

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.