Staff Pick
Part erotic thriller, part psychological study, part murder mystery, The Paying Guests is an intricate tale that will keep you on the edge of your seat. Frances and her mother live in a large estate in a small English village, but after having lost all the male members of their family in the war, they are faced with taking in lodgers in order to make ends meet. The young married couple who moves in seems fine at first, but Frances begins to see them in a different light. Soon an unspoken slow-boil attraction blossoms into a passionate love affair, and things in the house become difficult to manage. A commentary on post-war mores, unexpected passion, crime and punishment, and personal integrity, The Paying Guests is a blistering tale of suspense that does not ease up on the unnerving tension. Recommended By Dianah H., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
The “volcanically sexy” (USA Today) bestseller about a widow and her daughter who take a young couple into their home in 1920s London.
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.
Short-listed for the Man Booker Prize three times, Sarah Waters has
earned a reputation as one of our greatest writers of historical
fiction.
Review
“Superb, bewitching…Forget about Fifty Shades of Grey; this novel is one of the most sensual you will ever read, and all without sacrificing either good taste or a “G” rating… [The Paying Guests]
is a magnificent creation, a book that doubles as a time machine,
flinging us back not only to postwar London, but also to our own lost
love affairs, the kind that left us breathless” NPR
Review
“You open The Paying Guests and immediately surrender to the
smooth assuredness of Sarah Waters’s silken prose… You cannot choose but
read. The book has you in thrall. You will follow Waters and her story
anywhere… A novel that initially seems as if it might have been written
by E.M. Forster darkens into something by Dostoevsky or Patricia
Highsmith. It also becomes unputdownable … the reader is in for a
seriously heart-pounding roller-coaster ride.” The Washington Post
Review
“[Waters] masterfully weaves true crime, domestic life and romantic
passion into one of the best novels of suspense since Daphne du
Maurier’s Rebecca… [The Paying Guests is] diabolically clever… with one of the hottest sex scenes ever to be set in a scullery.” Los Angeles Times
Review
“The new Sarah Waters novel, which finds the author at the height of her
powers, weaves her characteristic threads of historical melodrama,
lesbian romance, class tension, and sinister doings into a fabric of
fictional delight that alternately has the reader flipping pages as
quickly as possible, to find out what happens next, and hesitating to
turn the page, for fear of what will happen next.” Boston Globe
Review
“A beautiful and turbulent novel about the complexity, and often
futility, of personal and social change… Waters has not only crafted a
vivid portrait of class dissolution in post-WWI London, but also a look
at the achingly human need for a sense of purpose and, if we’re lucky, a
little intimacy.” A.V. Club
About the Author
Sarah Waters is the bestselling author of four previous novels: Tipping the Velvet; Affinity; Fingersmith; and The Night Watch. Winner of many literary awards, she has been shortlisted for both the Man Booker and Orange Prizes. She lives in London.