With her usual masterly powers for evoking atmosphere, Sarah Waters treats us to this utterly unnerving ghost story. When Dr Faraday is called to the once-glorious, now decaying, Hundreds Hall to treat a young maid sick with fear, he becomes inextricably involved with the Ayres family: Caroline, her mother and the war-wounded Roderick. Is the house out of time with the world? Is that the root cause of the sadness and strange occurrences? Or is it something else?
Lovereading view...
The latest novel from prize-wining author Sarah Waters is a gothic ghost story, set in a run-down country house just after WWII. It centres upon a doctor who is called to attend a patient there and the events that slowly begin to unfold. It's full of atmosphere and is story-telling at its best.
After her award-winning trilogy of Victorian novels, Sarah Waters turned to the 1940s and wrote THE NIGHT WATCH, a tender and tragic novel set against the backdrop of wartime Britain. Shortlisted for both the Orange and the Man Booker, it went straight to number one in the bestseller chart. In a dusty post-war summer in rural Warwickshire, a doctor is called to a patient at Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the Georgian house, once grand and handsome, is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable yard permanently fixed at twenty to nine. But are the Ayreses haunted by something more sinister than a dying way of life? Little does Dr Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become entwined with his. Prepare yourself. From this wonderful writer who continues to astonish us, now comes a chilling ghost story.
Reviews
'It's a gripping story, with beguiling characters ... As well as being a supernatural tale, it is a meditation on the nature of the British and class, and how things are rarely what they seem. Chilling' Kate Mosse, The Times, Summer Read
'Waters writes with a firm, confident hand, deftly building an atmosphere that begins in a still, hot summer and gradually darkens and tightens until we are as gripped by the escalating horror as the Ayres are. She is particularly good at depicting Hundreds, the dilapidated Georgian pile that dazzles ... Waters' persistent picking apart of class is fascinating
Tracy Chevalier, Observer 'By now readers must be confident of her mastery of storytelling ... While at one turn, the novel looks to be a ghost story, the next it is a psychological drama ... But it is also a brilliantly observed story, verging on the comedy, about Britain on the cusp of modern age ... The writing is subtle and poised
Joy lo Dico, Independent on Sunday 'Displaying her remarkable flair for period evocation, Waters recreates backwater Britain just after the Second World War with atmospheric immediacy ... Acute and absorbing
Peter Kemp, Sunday Times 'Waters is often described as a brilliant storyteller, and so she is. But she is also an artist compelled to experiment ... Waters gives herself a 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 novels unsettling power
Claudia Fitzherbert, Daily Telegraph 'It would be unfair to reveal very much about The Little Stranger: enough to say that this reader, left along one night in her boxy Seventies ex-council house ? about as unspooky a place as you can image ? had to stop reading for fright. This is an effective, gripping book. Sarah Waters
ability to evoke the 1940s shows the same mastery she displaying in The Night Watch, and her descriptive powers are nearly unparalleled ... Waters has sat herself down in front of a roaring fire and determined to scare the pants off her rightly devoted audience. In that she succeeds unequivocally. You'll want to sleep with the light on
Erica Wagner, The Times 'Alongside episodes of memorable horror, class is the most interesting element of The Little Stranger ... Waters stages a superb depiction of the menace of inanimate objects ... Ambitious and original
Sean O 'Brien, TLS 'The horrors are brilliantly orchestrated, and rise effortlessly in scale and explicitness ... Waters knows what she is about, and the novels interests are only partly in the supernatural and the ghost story ... Waters has used the formal and conventional tactics of fiction ? the stiffer, the better ? to examine a read human situation ...The fascination of The Little Stranger lies in its unnerving evocation of place and time. It is a beautiful and expert divertissement
Philip Hensher, Spectator 'Water serves up a truly frightening scene in the deserted nursery ... As I lay in bed after finishing reading it, running the various elements through my mind, a fox screamed outside my window and I nearly had a heart attack
Suzi Feay, Literary Review 'Sarah Waters has, quite singlehandedly, at this late date, renewed the whole genre of the spooky gothic novel. Quite a feat
David Sexton, Evening Standard 'The knowledge that something nasty is around the corner lends the narrative a compelling sense of unease. At the same time, the richness of Waters
writing ensures that the air of thickening dread is very thick indeed ... Waters is a brave writer. The Little Stranger is an engrossing, hugely enjoyable read with set pieces guaranteed to make anyone with a pulse gibber in fright
John Preston, Sunday Telegraph 'Sarah Waters
masterly novel is a perverse hymn to decay, to the corrosive power of class resentment as well as the damage wrought by war ... (Waters has) a perfect understanding of her period ... She deploys the vigour and cunning one finds in Margaret Atwood's fiction, the same narrative ease and expansiveness, and the same knack of twisting the tension tighter and tighter within an individual scene ... The Little Stranger operates in the queasy borderlands between the supernatural and the psychopathological, and it is territory in which Waters moves with an air of supreme ease ... It is gripping, confident, unnerving and supremely entertaining ... 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
Hilary Mantel, Guardian 'A spine-tingler ... Waters skilfully ratchets up the suspense as events at Hundreds grow ever more highly charged ? even downright chilling
Amber Pearson, Daily Mail 'This is more than a detective and/or ghost story. It is also a study of post-war Britain ... Social document; intriguing detective yarn; chilling ghost story, romance or thriller, The Little Stranger is a marvellous read on so very many levels
Christine Dwyer Hickey, Irish Times
About the Author
Sarah Waters was born in Wales in 1966 and lives in London. She has a Ph.D in English Literature and has lectured for the Open University. She won the Betty Trask Award for Tipping The Velvet and the Somerset Maugham Award and Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year for Affinity. Fingersmith was shortlisted for both the Orange Prize 2002 and for the Man Booker Prize 2002, and won the CWA Historical Dagger prize before earning her three 2003 Author of the Year awards - from the Booksellers Association, Waterstone's and The British Book Awards. Sarah Waters is also the winner of The South Bank Show Award.
11 Feb
Sylvia Plath died 1963. An American poet, novelist, children's author, and short story author. Best known for her poetry, and her death which mirrored an attempted suicide in The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel. Read books by Sylvia Plath
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