And the people that she visits must choose. Why don't you come away with me? And she offers people her hand. And if anybody else knew, they wouldn't want you. And she comes to you, and she says, look I know how weak you are and how cowardly. PERRY: So the premise of the novel is that this very lonely woman begins to hear that there is a creature called Melmoth the Witness who has been damned to wander the Earth for 2,000 years witnessing humanity at its worst. SIMON: Sketch "Melmoth" in for us, could you please? Sarah Perry, author of the international best-seller "The Essex Serpent," joins us now from New York.
Karel, a scholar friend, gives Helen a pile of text - histories, diaries, letters, footnotes - and she begins to find in those pages the outlines of a woman who reaches across centuries, from 17th-century England to Germany in the 1940s and modern-day Manila to witness and absorb the horror of the forgotten and forlorn, Melmoth.
As Sarah Perry writes in her new novel, "Melmoth," Helen has an air of sadness whose source she cannot guess at. Helen Franklin is post-40-ish, an English exile who's had a pretty humdrum time for the 20 years or so she's been in the cosmopolitan city of Prague where she translates sparkling prose, like the instructions for washing machines.
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