Look! You, who holds this Holiday Newsletter in your hands, are briefly taken aback by this sudden declaratory statement. What might distinguish this brief piece from the rest that clutter this inventory of précis? Nothing at all—nothing, that is, but this: the moment that passes as you follow this sentence to the end is the last when you know nothing of Melmoth (Custom House, $27.99), Sarah Perry's follow-up to 2016's sleeper hit The Essex Serpent. It is a novel that ranges from Prague to the Philippines, Cairo to Constantinople. An index of the horrors of fascism and society's cowardice; a map of the scars self-inflicted by the desperately penitent. It is the story of one Helen Franklin, whose search for a friend gone missing leads her down a trail of witness reaching back centuries. And it is the account of the spectral being that watches her, be it illusion or god, whose hands reach across space and time towards those who have given up hope. A gothic page-turner that is, in its own way, an aggressively contemporary book.