Now you can browse new titles by year.

Book Summary and Reviews of The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

The Little Stranger

by Sarah Waters

  • Critics' Consensus:
  • Readers' Rating:
  • Published:
  • Apr 2009, 480 pages
  • Rate this book

  • Buy This Book

About this book

Book Summary

From the multi-award-winning and bestselling author of The Night Watch and Fingersmith comes an astonishing novel about love, loss, and the sometimes unbearable weight of the past.

In a dusty post-war summer in rural Warwickshire, a doctor is called to see a patient at lonely Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the once grand house is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its garden choked with weeds. All around, the world is changing, and the family is struggling to adjust to a society with new values and rules.

Roddie Ayres, who returned from World War II physically and emotionally wounded, is desperate to keep the house and what remains of the estate together for the sake of his mother and his sister, Caroline. Mrs. Ayres is doing her best to hold on to the gracious habits of a gentler era and Caroline seems cheerfully prepared to continue doing the work a team of servants once handled, even if it means having little chance for a life of her own beyond Hundreds.

But as Dr. Faraday becomes increasingly entwined in the Ayreses' lives, signs of a more disturbing nature start to emerge, both within the family and in Hundreds Hall itself. And Faraday begins to wonder if they are all threatened by something more sinister than a dying way of life, something that could subsume them completely.

Both a nuanced evocation of 1940s England and the most chill-inducing novel of psychological suspense in years, The Little Stranger confirms Sarah Waters as one of the finest and most exciting novelists writing today.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

Media Reviews

"Starred Review. Waters reflects on the collapse of the British class system after WWII in a stunning haunted house tale ..." - Publishers Weekly Pick of the Week

"Waters is often described as a brilliant storyteller, and so she is. But she is also an artist compelled to experiment. After proving her genius for plotting in the Gothic Victorian books which made her name, she wrote a novel in which the point was not what happened next. The result? Many readers who enjoyed The Night Watch read it twice. In The Little Stranger, Waters gives herself another sort of handicap with the dull doctor’s narration. This indirectness, which in cruder hands might have led to yawning insurrection in the reader, becomes essential to the novel’s unsettling power." - The Daily Telegraph (UK)

"It is gripping, confident, unnerving and supremely entertaining. And its mood lingers; in the 24 hours after finishing it, readers may hear, as I did, the whisper of its events bedding down into consciousness. Its allusions, its implications softly gather and fold themselves into the space in the mind that the book has made for itself, falling into place with a soft hiss, a rustle like phantom silks." - The Guardian (UK)

"What saves The Little Stranger from sinking into a fetid swamp of cliche is the author's restraint, her ability, like James's, to excite our imagination through subtle suggestion alone. The supernatural creaks and groans that reverberate through this tale are accompanied by malignant strains of class envy and sexual repression that infect every perfectly reasonable explanation we hear. The result is a ghost story as intelligent as it is stylish." - The New York Times

This information about The Little Stranger was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Reader Reviews

Write your own reviewwrite your own review

Cathryn Conroy

A Good Ghost Story, But Way Too Longwinded
Imagine "Downton Abbey" meets "Rebecca." Well, a downtrodden, shabby, dilapidated Downton Abbey, that is. This gothic ghost story set on a crumbling and decaying English estate just after World War I tells the story of a small family--Mrs. Ayres and her two grown children, Caroline and Roderick. It is narrated in the first person by a country doctor, Dr. Faraday, who meets the family as a physician and then becomes entwined in their affairs--personal and supernatural.

Written by Sarah Waters, the book is filled with vivid descriptions that make the scenery, the estate and the characters just pop into something very real. That said, the descriptions are quite long-winded so the book definitely drags along. Not much happens until about 20 percent into it, and even then it still moves like molasses. Most of the action occurs in the last 20 percent of the story. I have a feeling most readers end up finishing it just because of all they have put into getting to the halfway mark. Still, there are enough plot developments to give you the shivers--and keep on keepin' on. It really is a very good ghost story, although one that takes way too long to tell. That is why I gave it three stars.

Warning to Kindle readers: DO NOT use the X-ray feature for the characters, as it is a huge spoiler by giving away key plot points--including the ending.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Author Information

Sarah Waters Author Biography

Sarah Waters was born in Wales in 1966. She has a Ph.D. in English Literature and has been an associate lecturer with the Open University.

She has written five novels: Tipping the Velvet, which won the Betty Trask Award; Affinity, which won the Somerset Maugham Award, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday /John Llewellyn Rhys Prize; Fingersmith, which was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize, and won the South Bank Show Award for Literature and the CWA Historical Dagger; The Night Watch, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Man Booker Prize; and The Little Stranger, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the South Bank Show Literature Award.

She was included in Granta's prestigious list ...

... Full Biography
Link to Sarah Waters's Website

Other books by Sarah Waters at BookBrowse
  • The Paying Guests jacket
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

More Recommendations

Readers Also Browsed . . .

more literary fiction...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: The Schubert Treatment
    The Schubert Treatment
    by Claire Oppert
    Claire Oppert fell in love with music at an early age and trained to make a career as a classical ...
  • Book Jacket
    Murder by Degrees
    by Ritu Mukerji
    Lydia Weston is among the first wave of female physicians and professors in the United States. ...
  • Book Jacket: Women's Hotel
    Women's Hotel
    by Daniel M. Lavery
    In the 1920s–1960s, the Barbizon Hotel for Women was a residential hotel where respectable ...
  • Book Jacket: Intermezzo
    Intermezzo
    by Sally Rooney
    In 2022, Sally Rooney delivered a lecture that later ran in The Paris Review, in which she stated ...

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Libby Lost and Found
    by Stephanie Booth

    Libby Lost and Found is a book for people who don't know who they are without the books they love.

Who Said...

Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem.

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

H I O the G

and be entered to win..

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.