This is a time when, as a consequence of the Great War, the old constraints of gender and class began to break apart. Our tastes rarely coincide so I opened it without a great deal of enthusiasm and probably wouldn’t have bothered except for the fact it’s set in 1920s Britain which is a period that fascinates me. With that poor track record you might well wonder how I came to end up reading her most recent novel The Paying Guests? The answer is quite simple – my mother who pressed it upon me after her reading group raved about it. I did give Fingersmith a go but found it rather dull. I was put off her first novel Tipping the Velvet when I learned the central character is a music hall star (I’m a straight drama girl and shudder at the prospect of any stage performances involving music).

Her next will probably be even better.Though I like to support authors from my home country of Wales, Sarah Waters is one writer that hasn’t grabbed me as yet. I have tried and failed to find a single negative thing to say about it. But The Paying Guests is the apotheosis of her talent at least for now. At her greatest, Waters transcends genre: the delusions in Affinity (1999), the vulnerability in Fingersmith (2002), the undercurrents of social injustice and the unexplained that underlie all her work, take her, in my view, well beyond the capabilities of her more seriously regarded Booker-winning peers. It is above all a wonderful, compelling story. This is vintage Sarah Waters: beautifully described with excruciating tension, real tenderness, believable characters, and surprises. And as passions mount and frustration gathers, no one can foresee just how far-reaching, and how devastating, the disturbances will be. 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.įor 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. Ex-servicemen are disillusioned, the out-of-work and the hungry are demanding change. This novel from the internationally bestselling author of The Little Stranger, is a brilliant ‘page-turning melodrama and a fascinating portrait of London of the verge of great change’ ( Guardian)

The paying guests by sarah waters