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

The following morning, coming early to the café for coffee and a pastry, Karel found the old man seated at an empty table. Curiosity put her palm between his shoulder blades and pushed him over; he set his own plate down, and said: 'May I join you?'

Startled, the old man had cast his eyes about the room; then putting his palm on the chair beside him as if to indicate that he was shortly to be joined by another, said vaguely: 'Oh – ah: well, that chair, I think, is free.' His Czech was careful and decorous; his German accent that of a man for whom Prague's river would always, really, be the Moldau.

'You work hard,' said Karel, gesturing to a leather file on the table. 'You put us all to shame. What an ethic!' Then he said, 'Karel Pražan, of Charles University; though not very often, if I can help it.' He put out his hand.

'Josef Hoffman,' said the man. 'A pleasure.' They shook, and the touch of palm on palm actually rustled, as though Hoffman were made of paper.

Not a great deal was exchanged that day – statutory pleasantries regarding the fine weather, and the difficulty of locating anything at all on the shelves these days, what with the staff being so young, and always putting some new system in place. But in the days that followed, if one saw the other a silent greeting passed between them, as if they were colleagues pursuing some common purpose. It was a pleasure to encounter Hoffman in the café, eating potato salad with a spoon; it was a pleasure to note that, yes, again, he carried that leather file, sometimes rubbing with his thumb the gilded monogram J.A.H.; that he kept the little paving stone in his pocket at all times. Karel never discovered what his occupation had been, but was delighted to find him knowledgeable in all kinds of subjects, and had never lived long in one country. He possessed a formidable memory for fact and figure, and took so great a pleasure in treating his new friend like a pupil that Karel concluded he must once have been the master of some country school: did he know, for example, that Saddam Husein was once given the keys to the city of Detroit? That even the dead can get gooseflesh? The two often spoke in German, Hoffman moved to quiet laughter by Karel's inelegant phrasing, his impoverished vocabulary. In return for help with grammar and usage, Karel showed Hoffman how to operate a computer, which the old man treated with intelligent awe. All technology interested him, and he often spoke – with some sentiment – of an old radio he'd once used when he was young. He was in all things intelligent, courteous, quiet, and rather shy; if asked what it was that he was writing he would say, 'Only an old man's recollections that will never be read', and without rancour change the subject. He was given to sudden fits of melancholy, and on those mornings did nothing but incline his head towards his friend, barely raising his eyes from the manuscript which seemed to be the sole preoccupation of his life. At these times Karel would see him cross out page after page, the nib of his pen scoring the paper; weeping in the arid way of the old, who have already wept themselves dry; at these times he would fretfully move the empty chair beside him this way and that; or lean first towards it, and then away ...

So they'd gone on, the old man and the aging one. If Thea's stroke and its consequences had knocked Karel off course, and presented him with daily evidence of his own selfishness, Josef Hoffman was a fixed point – and one which, what's more, required a redemptive degree of kindness. When Karel came to the library that last morning – a full year turned, the winter air clean and bright as polished glass, the courtyard rimed with frost – and found himself first to arrive (the custodians of the library cloakroom still drinking from their Thermos flasks; no security guards at their post) he laughed to think he'd at last beaten Hoffman to the door. Hoffman, who'd chide him so often for arriving at his desk an hour later than any good student should! It occurred to Karel to play a little trick: perhaps he might even transgress so far as to sit at desk 209, or in that always empty chair, and risk the old man's wrath. He slipped past the cloakroom unnoticed, a light coat thrown over his arm – laughing quietly at such an innocent deceit, the library empty, and his heels rapping out against the floor; the corridors, the oak drawers with their obsolete hoard of library catalogue cards, the view of the courtyard, all in their emptiness seeming entirely strange, as if he had never been there before. Then the great ironclad door, with its noisy latch; he lifted it, and slipped through. No librarians yet at their post, the ranks of desks miserably empty, like sockets from which teeth had been pulled; from the vaulted plaster ceiling plaster babies descended, screaming, as if behind the vault their soft fat feet were being scorched with branding irons. All this Karel saw, uneasy; what had been a place of comfort and industry now repelled him, so that he turned on the threshold to go back. How dark it was, with no lamps shining at their desks! – but, no: a single light was switched on, there, far at the back – left on overnight, perhaps, by some janitor heedless of the cost. It shone down and illuminated a sleeping scholar. Karel, coming slowly down the aisle between the desks, saw the outstretched arms that made an aching pillow for the stooping head; the curved back, the spill of white hair over the dark sleeve. 'Josef!' said Karel to himself; hardly surprising, really, that the old man had taken a nap. 'Josef?' he said, tiptoeing nearer, and speaking tenderly, as if to a sleeping child. Later he thought: why did it not occur to him, then, that Hoffman was taking his last long sleep? Ninety-four, and weary, and the library so comfortable and quiet – he reached the desk, and lightly put his hand on Hoffman's shoulder. 'Josef!' he said, 'Shouldn't you be at your work by now?' But Hoffman didn't wake, only fell aside, slumped against the green surface of the desk. The old head lolled against the shoulder – the hair was long, and white, and rough; it was the hair of a man who no longer cared what others might make of him, and Karel thought: was he always this man, with his shoes broken down and those great raw wrist bones erupting from the fraying cuffs of his greasy sleeves? 'Josef,' he said again, and this time shook the shoulder beneath his hand – again the head lolled, rotating on the thin corded neck, so that it turned a blind face up to its tormentor. The eyes were open – they were green – they gazed at Karel, imploring, in an expression of fear and dread; the mouth (Karel shudders, remembering) wide open, the lower jaw fixed awry, as if some unkind hand had tugged it aside as he lay screaming. The hands outstretched upon the desk were not at rest, but rigid, palms down, the fingers hooked, the nails scoring at the surface; there were pale marks visible, as if those hands had scrabbled frantically at the leather for minutes at a stretch; and scattered across the desk, in pieces as if crushed by a great weight, were fragments of stone. Beside him another chair had been prepared: it was tilted, as if he'd been deep in conversation with a companion who'd long since left; beneath the chair something unmoving, ill-defined, a scrap of dark fine fabric perhaps; oh, very dark, very fine, like the hem of a woman's dress; as Karel watched, it slipped, as fabric sometimes does – moved, again, as if a breeze passed over it. Karel, in a daze, put out his hand; then a window slipped its latch and blew back against the wall. He cried out, and turned: a jackdaw lighted on the sill, blinked its blue eye once, and left. That look, he later thought, was what recalled him to his senses: nothing on the floor after all but Hoffman's feet, twisted back against the joints of his ankles, and the deep unmoving shadows of the desk and chair. He ran out then, indecently fast (as if the old man might rear up! As if those hands might reach blindly out!), and encountering the security guards at last at their posts said, 'An old man – a heart attack, I think? – you'd better call an ambulance.' Then there'd been all the banalities: students turned away at the door half complaining, half relieved; bitter coffee shared from a flask, curious questioning from the staff; and if he shuddered to think of Hoffman's face, and the horrid gaping of his open mouth, it was only death, the old debt paid on all those years spent living. As he waited by the entrance, uncertain of death's etiquette (should he remain with his old friend – would there be suspicions, perhaps?) a solemn woman approached. 'Dr Pražan, yes? I found this,' she said, 'while cleaning.' She paused, and narrowed her eyes. 'There was a note saying we should give it to you. Not how we usually do things: most irregular. Not part of my job. Still,' she said, 'under the circumstances. It's his, isn't it? The dead one. Didn't I think I knew him, but as soon as I saw this I could picture him clear as you standing there now. Those initials, there – always wondered what they stood for. Well, I know now, don't I? German, I suppose.' Here, a very faint note of distaste. 'Still, it's a shame.' Reluctantly she handed it over; Karel took it, and left it unopened on his lap.

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.