But, unaware, as Helen wanders the cobblestone streets, she is being watched. And then Karel disappears . . .

Including an unforgettable cast of characters—including a young woman in 1930s Cairo; a junior Ottoman bureaucrat during World War I; a child in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia; two brothers in Manila; and a desperate refugee from central Africa, precariously seeking shelter in 2017 London—Sarah Perry’s breathtaking follow-up to The Essex Serpent is a haunting novel of Gothic dread and moral struggle, a masterpiece of suspense, reckoning, and incandescent midnight.