It seems appropriate that Sarah Perry chooses to meet in a road named Tombland. The author of The Essex Serpent is very much alive to the echoes of the dead. “My approach to time,” she says, cheerfully, “is that I have never felt the present is particularly important.”
We are in Norwich, where she lives, in Shiki, a Japanese restaurant directly opposite the cathedral. Perry has been a regular here for years. “They used to do a night, I think it was a Tuesday,” she says,- with a giggle, “when it was all you can eat. You got given this pile of little scraps of paper, and you would tick what you wanted and give it to the waiter. We never came back for a while after that because we were so embarrassed about how much we’d had. We still have the pile of papers to shame us in my husband’s study.”
