by SarahWaters (Author)
'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. This is vintage Sarah Waters: beautifully described with excruciating tension, real tenderness, believable characters, and surprises. It is above all a wonderful, compelling story.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 608
Edition: 0
Publisher: Virago
Published: 04 Jun 2015
ISBN 10: 0349004609
ISBN 13: 9780349004600
Book Overview: - National consumer advertising - Bringing Sarah Waters' London to life - interactive content celebrating her unique vision of the capital through all her novels - Consumer competitions and publication day activity to ensure this is THE literary PB of the summer -
Prizes: Winner of Independent Bookshop Week Book Awards: Adult Book 2015. Long-listed for IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2016 and Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2015 and Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2015.
Fiction book of the year
This novel magnificently confirms [Sarah Waters's] status as an unsurpassed fictional recorder of vanished eras and hidden lives