The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters

The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters

The New York Times bestselling novel that has been called a tour de force (Wall Street Journal), unputdownable (The Washington Post), a delicious hothouse of a novel (USA Today), effortless (The Economist), seductive (Vanity Fair) and pitch perfect (Salon)

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 - NPR

One of the year's most engrossing and suspenseful novels.a love affair, a shocking murder, and a flawless ending . Will keep you sleepless for three nights straight and leave you grasping for another book that can sustain that high. -- Entertainment Weekly (A rating)

Volcanically sexy, sizzingly smart, plenty bloody and just plain irresistible. --USA Today (4 stars)

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, Sarah: - Sarah Waters has written six novels: Tipping the Velvet (1998, Betty Trask Award); Affinity (1999, Somerset Maugham Award, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award); Fingersmith (2002, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize, and winner of the South Bank Show Award for Literature and the CWA Historical Dagger); The Night Watch (2006, shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Man Booker Prize); The Little Stranger (2009, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the South Bank Show Literature Award) and The Paying Guests (2014, shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction). She was included in Granta's prestigious list of 'Best of Young British Novelists 2003', and in the same year was voted Author of the Year at the British Book Awards and the BA Conference, and won the Waterstones Author of the Year Award. In April 2015 she joined the Council of the Society of Authors.