The Paying Guests - SIGNED & DATED Proof/ARC

Waters, Sarah

ISBN 10: 0349004366 / ISBN 13: 9780349004365

Published by Virago, 2014

About this Item

1st edition publisher's Proof/ARC. Signed & dated in 2014 by author on the title page with no other inscriptions. Book in near fine condition, spine unbroken, very slight wear at top of spine. Not a book club edition, ex library or a remainder. I am happy to supply scans.

Seller Inventory # ABE-1641752959478

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Paying Guests - SIGNED & DATED Proof/ARC
• Publisher: Virago
• Publication Date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0349004366
• ISBN 13: 9780349004365
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Near Fine
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)

About this title

Synopsis

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.

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. Little do the Wrays know just how profoundly their new tenants will alter the course of Frances’s life—or, as passions mount and frustration gathers, how far-reaching, and how devastating, the disturbances will be.

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