The Essex Serpent

This book was a pleasant surprise. I was thinking it was going to be pretty pulpy. But it wasn't. It's a gothic or mystery type novel. It has mystery and unraveling. It is a work that has elements of feminism and socialism which is a nice break from most Victorian-era novels. Which are mostly about modesty and puritanism.

Update: reread it in English. It was even better.
Some things I liked:
p. 24: “ Come tomorrow, if you like, to the grave. I said I'd go alone, but perhaps that's the point; perhaps we are always alone, no matter the company we keep.”
p.127: “Sometimes I think I sold my soul, so that I could live as I must. Oh, I don't mean without morals or conscience - I only mean with freedom to think the thoughts that come, to send them to go, not to let them run along tracks someone else set, leading only this way or that..' .... ‘I've sold my soul, though I'm afraid it didn't fetch too high a price. I had faith, the sort I think you might be born with, but I've seen what it does and I traded it in. It's a sort of blindness, or a choice to be mad - to turn your back on everything new and wonderful - not to see that there's no fewer miracles in the microscope than in the gospels!”
p. 216: “‘No such business', he said cheerfully. ‘I'm quite religious you know: no patience for the supernatural'”.
p. 343: “We've loved each other so long I've never been a man and not loved her. I can no more imagine life without her than without my own limbs. Who will I be if she is gone? If she is not looking at me - will I still be here? Will I look in the mirror one morning and find my reflection gone?

Some words I liked or did not now:
genuflect - kneeling in a religious manner (for a shrine or something)
auspicious - favorable circumstances
declivity - incline or gradient in height
beck - brook or stream
tincture - a trace or vestige
distrait - preoccupied
homunculus - a miniature human
caul - a portion of the enclosing sac of a fetus
shingle - beach gravel