Meticulous Fingersmith and Tipping The Velvet writer Sarah Waters heads back a century for her sixth novel, the compelling and richly written The Paying Guests.
Opening up in London in 1922, we meet Mrs Wray, a formerly well-to-do widow and her spinster daughter Frances who have fallen on hard times following the late Mr Wray’s poor investments, and are forced to take in lodgers to make ends meet.
Meticulous Fingersmith and Tipping The Velvet writer Sarah Waters heads back a century for her sixth novel, the compelling and richly written The Paying Guests.
Opening up in London in 1922, we meet Mrs Wray, a formerly well-to-do widow and her spinster daughter Frances who have fallen on hard times following the late Mr Wray’s poor investments, and are forced to take in lodgers to make ends meet.
Somewhat brasher and less socially established than the Wrays, Lilian and Leonard Barber, a young upwardly mobile couple from the clerk class, bring a change in their domestic dynamic. Stuck indoors and tasked with doing the back-breaking work that the servants used to do while her ashamed mother is out of sight, the more worldly Frances soon strikes up a bond with the seemingly conservative Lilian, who is adjusting to running her own household.
Through fabulously alive paragraphs, the two young women start a fervent friendship, connecting over a love of books and, before long, fall in love. But the domestic bliss, which luxuriates in a tantalising slow burn, is soon shattered by a tragic event which binds the two women together in a terrifying way. Compelling from the start, with dialogue and detail giving a real sense of place and time, The Paying Guests does nevertheless fall short of topping some of Waters’ justifiably praised earlier novels.