Why a Booktrail?
Various: Twenty years ago Helen Franklin did something she cannot forgive herself for.
Melmoth
What you need to know before your trail
Twenty years ago Helen Franklin did something she cannot forgive herself for, and she has spent every day since barricading herself against its memory. But her sheltered life is about to change.
A strange manuscript has come into her possession. It is filled with testimonies from the darkest chapters of human history, which all record sightings of a tall, silent woman in black, with unblinking eyes and bleeding feet: Melmoth, the loneliest being in the world. Condemned to walk the Earth forever, she tries to beguile the guilty and lure them away for a lifetime wandering alongside her.
Everyone that Melmoth seeks out must make a choice: to live with what they’ve done, or be led into the darkness. Helen can’t stop reading, or shake the feeling that someone is watching her. As her past finally catches up with her, she too must choose which path to take.
Locations
ResetTravel Guide
Discover Prague with Melmoth
The novel is largely set in Prague and the sections that are are very interesting from a booktrail point of view:
“Look! It is winter in Prague: night rising in the mother of cities and over her thousand spires. Look down at the darkness around her feet, in all the lanes and alleys, as if it were a soft black dust swept there by a broom; look at the stone apostles on the old Charles Bridges, and at all the blue-eyed jackdaws on the shoulders of St John of Nepomuk. Look!”
The best bit for bookworms is the fact that a major setting is the wonderful National Library of the Czech Republic.
““No librarians yet at their post, the ranks of desks miserably empty, like sockets from which teeth had been pulled.”
Rest of the world
Melmoth – the legendary figure “cursed to wander the earth without home or respite… always watching, always seeking out everything that’s most distressing and most wicked, in a world which is surpassingly wicked, and full of distress.”The stories of this wanderer take readers from PRague to England to Turkey, Armenia (Armenian genocide), Nazi Germany and even the Philippines. Too vast to show on one map and some locations really give away the plot!
Booktrail Boarding Pass: Melmoth
Destination: Prague, Worldwide Author/Guide: Sarah Perry Departure Time: Various
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