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Published Apr 2009
480 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
From the multi-award-winning and bestselling author of The Night Watch
and Fingersmith comes an astonishing novel about love, loss, and the
sometimes unbearable weight of the past.
In a dusty post-war summer in rural Warwickshire, a doctor is called to see a
patient at lonely Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two
centuries, the once grand house is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its
garden choked with weeds. All around, the world is changing, and the family is
struggling to adjust to a society with new values and rules.
Roddie Ayres, who returned from World War II physically and emotionally wounded,
is desperate to keep the house and what remains of the estate together for the
sake of his mother and his sister, Caroline. Mrs. Ayres is doing her best to
hold on to the gracious habits of a gentler era and Caroline seems cheerfully
prepared to continue doing the work a team of servants once handled, even if it
means having little chance for a life of her own beyond Hundreds.
But as Dr. Faraday becomes increasingly entwined in the Ayreses' lives, signs of
a more disturbing nature start to emerge, both within the family and in Hundreds
Hall itself. And Faraday begins to wonder if they are all threatened by
something more sinister than a dying way of life, something that could subsume
them completely.
Both a nuanced evocation of 1940s England and the most chill-inducing novel of
psychological suspense in years, The Little Stranger confirms
Sarah Waters as one of the finest and most exciting novelists writing today.
"Starred Review. Waters reflects on the collapse of the British class system after WWII in a stunning haunted house tale ..." - Publishers Weekly Pick of the Week
"Waters is often described as a brilliant storyteller, and so she is. But she is also an artist compelled to experiment. After proving her genius for plotting in the Gothic Victorian books which made her name, she wrote a novel in which the point was not what happened next. The result? Many readers who enjoyed The Night Watch read it twice. In The Little Stranger, Waters gives herself another sort of handicap with the dull doctor’s narration. This indirectness, which in cruder hands might have led to yawning insurrection in the reader, becomes essential to the novel’s unsettling power." - The Daily Telegraph (UK)
"It is gripping, confident, unnerving and supremely entertaining. And its mood lingers; in the 24 hours after finishing it, readers may hear, as I did, the whisper of its events bedding down into consciousness. Its allusions, its implications softly gather and fold themselves into the space in the mind that the book has made for itself, falling into place with a soft hiss, a rustle like phantom silks." - The Guardian (UK)
"What saves The Little Stranger from sinking into a fetid swamp of cliche is the author's restraint, her ability, like James's, to excite our imagination through subtle suggestion alone. The supernatural creaks and groans that reverberate through this tale are accompanied by malignant strains of class envy and sexual repression that infect every perfectly reasonable explanation we hear. The result is a ghost story as intelligent as it is stylish." - The New York Times
This information about The Little Stranger was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sarah Waters was born in Wales in 1966. She has a Ph.D. in English Literature and has been an associate lecturer with the Open University.
She has written five novels: Tipping the Velvet, which won the Betty Trask Award; Affinity, which won the Somerset Maugham Award, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday /John Llewellyn Rhys Prize; Fingersmith, which was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize, and won the South Bank Show Award for Literature and the CWA Historical Dagger; The Night Watch, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Man Booker Prize; and The Little Stranger, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the South Bank Show Literature Award.
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