In a dusty post-war summer in rural Warwickshire, a doctor is called to a patient at Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the Georgian house, once grand and handsome, is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable yard permanently fixed at twenty to nine. But are the Ayreses haunted by something more sinister than a dying way of life? Little does Dr Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become entwined with his.
"Lore of the Manor": John O'Connell in the New Statesman on the resurrection of the country-house novel
Reviews
The Guardian
Hilary Mantel
"[A] masterly novel... One of the pleasures of the book is the way she combines spookiness with sharp social observation. She is at home in a convincing postwar setting; however much we pity the family at Hundreds Hall, as their ancestral pile and their sanity collapse about them, Waters never lets us lose sight of their repulsive social attitudes... It is gripping, confident, unnerving and supremely entertaining."
23/05/2009
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The Independent on Sunday
Joy Lo Dico
"While at one turn, the novel looks to be a ghost story, the next it is a psychological drama of the calibre of du Maurier's Rebecca. But it is also a brilliantly observed story, verging on comedy, about Britain on the cusp of the modern age.. While it may not have the shock value of Fingersmith or Tipping the Velvet, Waters has yet again written a classic thriller, styled as a classic thriller. It can be only a matter of time before a latter-day Hitchcock turns it into a film."
31/05/2009
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The Literary Review
Suzi Feay
"Her publishers have started the fun by billing this as ‘a chilling ghost story’... The Little Stranger is a splendid addition to the genre... Apart from all the spooky paraphernalia, there are wonderful set pieces – Caroline and Faraday go to a dance, the Ayreses host a doomed dinner party, Faraday seeks a second opinion from a disreputable colleague – in which Waters displays her gift for psychological penetration."
01/06/2009
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The Washington Post
Ron Charles
"What saves "The Little Stranger" from sinking into a fetid swamp of cliche is the author's restraint, her ability, like [Henry] 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."
20/05/2009
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The Sunday Times
Peter Kemp
"None of the paranormal paraphernalia manages to generate the clammy tension of the classic ghost tale (nerves are jangled far more effectively in naturalistic scenes such as those where Faraday courts Caroline with goose-pimpling, gauche persistence). And the spectral apparatus runs the risk of overshadowing the imaginative vitality that Waters brings to her depiction of post-war malaise and mobility. It’s in conjuring up the zeitgeist, not the poltergeist, that this novel excels. "
31/05/2009
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The Spectator
Philip Hensher
"This lesbian-less outbreak offers a good opportunity...to define a novelist not by her subject matter, but by her style and procedures... The horrors are brilliantly orchestrated, and rise effortlessly in scale and explicitness. The climax of the book...has all the mesmerising fury of M. R. James at his best... It is a beautiful and expert divertissement, less deeply felt than Waters’s superb The Night Watch, but no less admirable for all that."
27/05/2009
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The Daily Telegraph
John Preston
"The Little Stranger is an engrossing, hugely enjoyable read with set pieces guaranteed to make anyone with a pulse gibber in fright. For me, the climax doesn’t quite work; there’s a loss of tension over the last 20 pages that means this reader had recovered a disappointing amount of composure by the end. But it’s still a hell of a ride getting there."
14/05/2009
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The Daily Telegraph
Claudia Fitzherbert
"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."
29/05/2009
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The Times
Erica Wagner
"This is an effective, gripping book; Sarah Waters's ability to evoke the 1940s shows the same mastery she displayed in her last novel, The Night Watch, and her descriptive powers are nearly unparalleled. It could be argued that in some ways this novel is less satisfying than that earlier book; its characters have less depth and are more at the mercy of the plot than the lives unravelled in The Night Watch."
27/05/2009
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The New York Times
Scarlett Thomas
"Sarah Waters is an excellent, evocative writer, and this is an incredibly gripping and readable novel. But to some extent her skill works against her. The Ayreses are such lovingly depicted and realistic characters that it becomes hard to accept their gothic fates."
29/05/2009
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The Observer
Tracy Chevalier
"Waters's persistent picking apart of class is fascinating... In the end, though, however fresh the prose, confident the plotting and astute the social analysis, The Little Stranger has a slightly secondhand feel to it. Waters is clearly at the top of her game, with few to match her ability to bring the past to life in a fully imagined world. I look forward to the book in which she leaves behind past templates, with their limitations, and breaks away to make her own literary history."
31/05/2009
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Times Literary Supplement
Sean O'Brien
"In a curious way ... despite its Gothic ancestry, The Little Stranger is an austerity novel, working with deliberately restricted means. While the book contains a number of impressive set pieces, it is formally less interesting than its predecessor. Its focus is narrower, its world thinner in texture; there is necessarily little of the rich sensual life of The Night Watch; and the narrative is confined by the choice of Faraday as narrator."
29/05/2009
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The Financial Times
Fay Weldon
"The Little Stranger is two novels under one cover. One of these is a shrewd and highly readable social history... The other novel, intertwined, is a classic ghost story... [that] does not work so well. At any rate it failed to frighten me. It is too much of a pastiche; vivid enough, but too self-conscious for its own good... But...I stayed up into the small hours absorbed by the book, even while I was fuming at its failings, and didn’t regret it one bit."
08/06/2009
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