The Paying Guests
Sarah Waters
Formats & Editions
It is 1922, and London is tense. Ex-servicemen are disillusioned, the out-of-work and the hungry are demanding change. And in South London, in a genteel Camberwell villa, a large silent house now bereft of brothers, husband and even servants, life is about to be transformed, as impoverished widow Mrs Wray and her spinster daughter, Frances, are obliged to take in lodgers.
For with the arrival of Lilian and Leonard Barber, a modern young couple of the 'clerk class', the routines of the house will be shaken up in unexpected ways. And as passions mount and frustration gathers, no one can foresee just how far-reaching, and how devastating, the disturbances will be...
This is vintage Sarah Waters: beautifully described with excruciating tension, real tenderness, believable characters, and surprises. It is above all, a wonderful, compelling story.
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Praise for The Paying Guests
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Absolutely brilliant - Sunday TimesAnother wild ride of a novel . . . magnetic storytelling - ObserverA page-turning melodrama and a fascinating portrait of London on the verge of great change - GuardianThis novel magnificently confirms Sarah Waters's status as an unsurpassed fictional recorder of vanished eras and hidden lives - Sunday Times, Fiction Book of the YearYou know you are in the hands of a skilful, confident writer when you read a Sarah Waters book. She slowly reels you in. She weaves plots and themes that creep up and entangle you while you are innocently following her characters. They go about their shadowy business and by the time you raise your head from the page to take a breath, you're hooked - TelegraphThe Paying Guests demonstrates the writerly qualities for which Waters is esteemed, proving as 'fantastically moody and resonant', in terms of the rendering of domestic space, as a novel the author herself described as such and which she once said she would like to have written: Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca - Literary ReviewSickeningly tense - and thumpingly good - Daily Mail
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