Food in books: the raspberry and coconut cakes in Sarah Perry's The Essex Serpent

Kate Young discovers Sarah Perry’s new novel, full of realistic portraits of London, fantastic characters and a great love of food

By Kate Young for The Little Library Café, part of the Guardian Books Network

Charles commanded an awestruck girl in a white apron to bring at least a dozen of the cakes she personally liked best, and a gallon of tea. She evidently favoured coconut: there were macaroons, and speckled shortbread, and lozenges of cake doused in raspberry jam and rolled in coconut flakes.

The Essex Serpent, Sarah Perry

She’d pictured a woman of ladylike melancholy, who’d peck at her food, and sometimes fall silent to turn her wedding ring, or open a locket to gaze on the face of the departed. It was bewildering instead to be presented with a woman who ate elegantly, but in great quantities, making smiling apology for her appetite by declaring that she’d walked ten miles that morning and would do the same tomorrow.

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