For centuries, a mysterious dark-robed figure has roamed the globe, searching for those whose complicity and cowardice have fed into the rapids of history’s darkest waters—and now, in Sarah Perry’s breathtaking follow-up to The Essex Serpent, it is heading in our direction.

It has been years since Helen Franklin left England. In Prague, working as a translator, she has found a home of sorts—or, at least, unpronounced sanctuary. That changes when her friend Karel discovers a mysterious letter in the library, a strange confession and a curious warning that speaks of Melmoth the Witness, a dark legend found in obscure fairy tales and antique village lore. As such superstition has it, Melmoth hunts her prey through the ages, dooming those she captures to the damnation of timeless, itinerant solitude. To Helen it all seems the stuff of unenlightened fantasy.

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

Including an unforgettable cast of characters—among them Helen and her circle in contemporary Prague; a young woman in 1930s Cairo; a junior Ottoman bureaucrat during World War I; a child in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia; a young man caring for his severely ill brother in a Manila hospital; 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.