After Me Comes the Flood

Elegant, sinister, and psychologically complex, After Me Comes the Flood is the haunting debut novel by the bestselling author of The Essex Serpent and Melmoth. On a hot summer's day, John Cole decides to shut his bookshop early, and possibly forever, and drives out of London to see his brother. When his car breaks down on an isolated road, he goes looking for help and finds a dilapidated house. As he approaches, a laughing woman he's never seen before walks out, addresses him by name and explains she's been waiting for him. Entering the home, John discovers an enigmatic clan of residents all of whom seem to know who he is and claim they have been waiting for him to arrive. They seem to be waiting for something else, too--something final... Written before Sarah Perry's ascension to an internationally bestselling author, After Me Comes the Flood is a spectacular novel of obsession, conviction and providence--a startling investigation of the nature of determination in all senses of the word. Wrote Katherine Angel, author of Unmastered, Perry's novel "made me think of Fowles's The Magus, Maxwell's The Chateau, and Woolf's To the Lighthouse." Indeed.