Over six episodes, Claire Danes plays Cora Seaborne, a chirpy woman living in 1893 London with a passion for natural history. It’s these factors that make The Essex Serpent so good, avoiding what could have been a throwaway adaptation (here’s looking at you The Miniaturist) and instead producing a tense, brooding, solid drama. What is unexpected, however, is that it wasn’t the period drama-loving BBC or the purveyors of thrillers ITV who would eventually make it, but Apple TV+, the booming streaming service keen to take risks and with a massive budget to spend. It’s unsurprising that the novel would eventually be made into a TV series. But as reviews came in glowing with praise and people began to look past the intimidatingly baroque book jacket, The Essex Serpent became a word-of-mouth smash hit and closed 2016 as Waterstones Book of the Year. It wasn’t exactly a buzzy debut (Perry’s first book had been published two years earlier) and in the year of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroadand Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, readers weren’t exactly feeling the absence of a slow-burn tale of a mythical creature terrorising a 19th century Essex fishing village. Sarah Perry’s gothic novel, The Essex Serpent, arrived in bookshops in 2016 to little fuss.
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