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.
'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. An image sprang into her head: that round flesh, crimsoning in the heat.' 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.
'Masterly... delightful... tremendously vivid... Waters is a cracking storyteller' -- Tatler
Waters is not simply one of our best historical novelists, but one of our best novelists ... sooner or later, she's going to be given the Booker. If you haven't already, start reading her now, and be one step ahead of the crowd' -- Matt Thorne, Independent on Sunday
Author
About Sarah Waters
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.
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