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Book Reviewed by:A love story, a tension-filled crime story, and a beautifully atmospheric portrait of a fascinating time and place.
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, and here she has delivered again. A love story, a tension-filled crime story, and a beautifully atmospheric portrait of a fascinating time and place, The Paying Guests is Sarah Waters's finest achievement yet.
Waters fans will find the novel's first 300 pages much less plot-driven than any of her previous work; they may, in fact, find themselves utterly bored by the wealth of period detail – especially what can seem like endless descriptions of Frances's chores. Still, Waters's skill at evoking historical time periods is peerless, and once again she delivers romantic relationships with a powerfully erotic charge. The first half may drag somewhat, but you will simply not be able to turn the pages fast enough through the second...continued
Full Review
(637 words)
(Reviewed by Rebecca Foster).
Sarah Waters' The Paying Guests belongs to an unusual mixture of genres. Here is a partial pedigree of the literary influences on its style and content:
First Half
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