A stark depiction of human frailty, cruelty and cowardice

Fiction: Melmoth, Sarah Perry, Profile, hardback, 320 pages, €21.60

Myster: Sarah Perry has drawn on the uncanny before

Joanne Hayden

Appropriately enough for a story so steeped in the gothic, Sarah Perry's third novel is set mainly in Prague. Following a short prologue, an omniscient narrative voice zooms in on the city's Charles Bridge and comes to focus on the main character, Helen Franklin: "Forty-two, neither short nor tall, her hair neither dark nor fair."

As a device, it's both literary and cinematic. It's also useful and, for the most part, Perry uses it well, playing with it and drawing the reader into her game. The voice, quasi-Victorian and sometimes overblown, is a way of injecting humour into a novel with an ultra-serious core, one that is fixated on guilt, moral culpability and the prevalence of barely-lived lives.