The Paying Guests - Softcover

Sarah Waters

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0349004609 ISBN 13: 9780349004600

Publisher: Virago Press Ltd, 2015

Synopsis

It is 1922 and in a hushed south London villa life is about to be transformed as genteel widow Mrs Wray and her discontented daughter Frances are obliged to take in lodgers Lilian and Leonard Barber a modern young couple of the clerk class bring with them gramophone music colour fun and dangerous desires The most ordinary of lives it seems can explode into passion and drama

About this title

Review

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, September 2014: It is 1922, in a genteel house in a genteel neighborhood just outside of London. Here, the widowed Mrs. Wray and her 26-year-old daughter, Frances, pass each day very much like the day before—with Frances busying herself with household chores, maybe a bit of needlepoint, and her mother nibbling on a lunch of cauliflower cheese while making notes for the parish newsletter. In less skilled hands, such prolonged stage-setting would test even the most patient reader. But in Waters’, it’s mesmerizing, with every small but evocative detail serving to transport you further into this place and time. Take a deep breath as you’re reading, because as soon as you are you lulled into the calm cadence of these lives, the Wray’s tenants—the “paying guests” they have taken in to help with the bills—turn everything topsy-turvy, and by the novel’s conclusion, you have gone from straight-up period piece, to love story, to edge-of-your-seat crime thriller (and not the American kind “with a plot full of holes” that the Wrays suffer through on picture-house Wednesdays). For a story set just after WWI, some of the themes Waters touches on are surprisingly contemporary. History does repeat itself sometimes, and so it goes for Sarah Waters, with yet another masterful novel. –Erin Kodicek

About the Author

Sarah Waters was born in Wales in 1966. She has been shortlisted for the Man Booker and Orange prizes and has won The South Bank Show Award and The Somerset Maugham Award. Four of her novels have been adapted for television. She has been named as author of the Year four times - by the Booksellers Association, Sunday Times, Waterstone's and The British Book Awards.

Edition details

• Publisher: Virago Press Ltd
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0349004609
• ISBN 13: 9780349004600
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 599