While Danes is charming and vivacious as Cora, Tom Hiddleston’s committed, stoic performance as local vicar Will Ransome perfectly captures the overwhelming sense of dread that plagues Aldwinter. When her husband dies, she befriends his slimy know-it-all doctor, Luke Garrett (an expertly cast Frank Dillane of Fear the Walking Dead), who takes a shine to her, but before he can act on his feelings, Cora ups sticks to Essex to search for fossils and investigate news of a giant serpent living among the marshes.Īccompanied by her close friend and companion Martha ( Hayley Squires, Adult Material) and her son, Francis, her inquiries lead her to the small fishing village of Aldwinter, where strange occurrences have driven the locals into a state of fright, convinced that the serpent is a physical embodiment of the devil. 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.

The essex serpent book