The Essex Serpent author offers a moving account of her father-in-law’s final illness that will resonate widely
T
he novelist Sarah Perry’s father-in-law, David, died of oesophageal cancer in 2022. This book tells the story of his dying, from the last time she saw him well, on a trip to Great Yarmouth at the end of summer, to his death less than two months later, just nine days after being diagnosed.
It’s not easy to account for what makes this book so special. Its main character is as unpromisingly ordinary as its title suggests, and some may even find him a little boring. David Perry is the kind of man who spends hours sorting his beloved stamp collection into albums with the aid of long-tipped forceps and magnifying glasses, or filling in his Sudoku puzzle books, or reading the latest copy of the Antiques Gazette, looking intently at porcelain dogs and chased silver punch-bowls.
He has lived the uneventful, comfortable life of an upwardly-mobile baby boomer born at the end of the second world war. He spends most of that life in Basildon, while commuting on the Fenchurch Street line to work as an industrial chemist. On family holidays in Yarmouth, he sets his deckchair 3ft from the sea but never goes in it. Not much to cloud his days, then, apart from caring for a disabled wife who dies 10 years before him. After downsizing to a bungalow in Norwich, he dies at 77 – a lifespan slightly short of the national average, but no tragedy there.
