The Paying Guests

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Shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2015.

London 1922.  Frances and her mother lost all their male relatives in the war and are left struggling with a big house in Camberwell.  They take in lodgers, a young married couple.  The author is well known for her tales of gay relationships so it is no surprise when Frances and the young lodger’s wife, Lily, have an affair.  But it is a surprise to them.  Their passion escalates resulting in a tragedy.  When an innocent boy is charged with murder the girls have hard decisions to face.  This is a fascinating tale of class, sex and the consequences of a passionate affair.  It is tense with an unexpected ending, certainly a page-turner with the backdrop of a dreary London so vividly described; Sarah Waters at her best. 

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Reviewed by Sarah Broadhurst
Sarah Broadhurst spent her early working life in the book trade in both retail and wholesale until the arrival of children forced her to look for freelance work she could do from…
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About The Paying Guests

'There came the splash of water and the rub of heels as Mrs Barber stepped into the tub. After that there was a silence, broken only by the occasional echoey plink of drips from the tap...'Frances had been picturing her lodgers in purely mercenary terms - as something like two great waddling shillings. But this, she thought, was what it really meant to have paying guests: this odd, unintimate proximity, this rather peeled-back moment, where the only thing between herself and a naked Mrs Barber was a few feet of kitchen and a thin scullery door.

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