Helen Franklin is post-40-ish, an English exile who's had a pretty humdrum time for the 20 years or so she's been in the cosmopolitan city of Prague where she translates sparkling prose, like the ...

Sarah Perry's new novel, Melmoth, opens with an imperative: "Look!" The object of our gazes is Helen Franklin, 42, "small, insignificant, having about her an air ... of self-punishment, of self-hatred ...