The Paying Guests

Author: Sarah Waters
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698157702
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 478

Book Description
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.

The Paying Guest

Author: George Gissing
Publisher: The Floating Press
ISBN: 1775450317
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 131

Book Description
Over the course of his literary careeer, George Gissing emerged as a chronicler of Britain's emerging middle class. In novels such as New Grub Street, he took it upon himself to outline the challenges facing this new demographic niche, which he described as "well educated, fairly bred, but without money." The Paying Guest explores same of the same themes -- class tensions, intrigue, and the grit beneath the glittering surface of the Victorian era.

The Little Stranger

Author: Sarah Waters
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
ISBN: 1551993392
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 482

Book Description
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.

The Night Watch

Author: Sarah Waters
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350014087
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 138

Book Description
I thought everything would change, after the war. And now, no one even mentions it. It is as if we all got together in private and said whatever you do don't mention that, like it never happened. It's the late 1940s. Calm has returned to London and five people are recovering from the chaos of war. In scenes set in a quiet dating agency, a bombed-out church and a prison cell, the stories of these five lives begin to intertwine and we uncover the desire and regret that has bound them together. Sarah Waters's story of illicit love and everyday heroism takes us from a dazed and shattered post-war Britain back into the heart of the Blitz, towards the secrets that are hidden there. Olivier-nominated playwright Hattie Naylor has created a thrilling and theatrically inventive adaptation of a great modern novel. The stage adaptation of The Night Watch was premiered at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, on 16 May 2016.

Fingersmith

Author: Sarah Waters
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9781573229722
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 596

Book Description
“Oliver Twist with a twist…Waters spins an absorbing tale that withholds as much as it discloses. A pulsating story.”—The New York Times Book Review The Handmaiden, a film adaptation of Fingersmith, directed by Park Chan-wook and starring Kim Tae-Ri, is now available. Sue Trinder is an orphan, left as an infant in the care of Mrs. Sucksby, a "baby farmer," who raised her with unusual tenderness, as if Sue were her own. Mrs. Sucksby’s household, with its fussy babies calmed with doses of gin, also hosts a transient family of petty thieves—fingersmiths—for whom this house in the heart of a mean London slum is home. One day, the most beloved thief of all arrives—Gentleman, an elegant con man, who carries with him an enticing proposition for Sue: If she wins a position as the maid to Maud Lilly, a naïve gentlewoman, and aids Gentleman in her seduction, then they will all share in Maud’s vast inheritance. Once the inheritance is secured, Maud will be disposed of—passed off as mad, and made to live out the rest of her days in a lunatic asylum. With dreams of paying back the kindness of her adopted family, Sue agrees to the plan. Once in, however, Sue begins to pity her helpless mark and care for Maud Lilly in unexpected ways...But no one and nothing is as it seems in this Dickensian novel of thrills and reversals.

Affinity

Author: Sarah Waters
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0748129316
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Book Description
An eerily brilliant and spooky tale of spiritualism and deception 'Now you know why you are drawn to me - why your flesh comes creeping to mine, and what it comes for. Let it creep.' From the dark heart of a Victorian prison, disgraced spiritualist Selina Dawes weaves an enigmatic spell. Is she a fraud, or a prodigy? By the time it all begins to matter, you'll find yourself desperately wanting to believe in magic. 'Refined, repressed and simmering... a delicious tale of Victorian spiritualism' Independent on Sunday 'Spooky, spellbinding, exquisitely written' Val Hennessy 'Beautifully, atmospherically written, this is a tale to thrill your very soul' Metro 'Sexy, spooky, stylish... a wonderful book' Guardian

Arabella of Mars

Author: David D. Levine
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0765382814
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 351

Book Description
A century after Captain Kidd's first expedition to Mars, Arabella Ashby is set to leave her Martian plantation home for London to learn to be a lady, until her home is threatened and she joins the crew of a Mars Trading Company ship disguised as a boy.

What Shines from It

Author: Sara Rauch
Publisher: Alternating Current
ISBN: 9781946580115
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Book Description
The eleven stories in Sara Rauch's What Shines from It are rife with the physical and psychic wounds of everyday life. In "Beholden," girl meets boy meets the unsettled spirits of post-9/11 New York City, but her future can't hold them all. In "Kitten," a struggling veteran and his wife argue over adopting an abandoned kitten, deepening their financial and emotional rifts. In "Abandon," a ghost-baby ravages a woman's body following a late-term miscarriage, marring her chances for new love. And in "Kintsukuroi," a married potter falls for a married geologist and discovers the luminosity of being broken.What Shines from It is populated by women on the verge of transcendence-brimming with anger and love-and working-class artists haunted by the ghosts of their desires. Abiding by a distinctly guarded New England sensibility, these stories inhabit the borderlands of long-established cities, where humans are still learning to embrace the natural world. Subtly exploring sexualities, relationships, birth and rebirth, identity, ghosts, and longing, Rauch searches for the places where our protective shells are cracked and, in spare, poetic language, limns those edges of loneliness and loss with light.

Then We Came to the End

Author: Joshua Ferris
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0759572283
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Book Description
Winner of the Hemingway Foundation / PEN Award, this debut novel is "as funny as The Office, as sad as an abandoned stapler . . . that rare comedy that feels blisteringly urgent." (TIME) No one knows us in quite the same way as the men and women who sit beside us in department meetings and crowd the office refrigerator with their labeled yogurts. Every office is a family of sorts, and the Chicago ad agency depicted in Joshua Ferris's exuberantly acclaimed first novel is family at its best and worst, coping with a business downturn in the time-honored way: through gossip, elaborate pranks, and increasingly frequent coffee breaks. With a demon's eye for the details that make life worth noticing, Joshua Ferris tells an emotionally true and funny story about survival in life's strangest environment—the one we pretend is normal five days a week. One of the Best Books of the Year Boston Globe * Christian Science Monitor * New York Magazine * New York Times Book Review * St. Louis Post-Dispatch * Time magazine * Salon

Tipping The Velvet

Author: Sarah Waters
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0748129324
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Book Description
From the oyster huts of Whitstable to the music halls of Victorian London, Tipping the Velvet is the glorious first novel from this much-loved author 'Piercing the shadows of the naked stage was a single shaft of rosy limelight, and in the centre of this was a girl: the most marvellous girl - I knew it at once! - that I had ever seen.' A saucy, sensuous and multi-layered historical romance, Tipping the Velvet follows the glittering career of Nan King - oyster girl turned music-hall star turned rent boy turned East End 'tom'. 'Erotic and absorbing... Written with startling power' New York Times Book Review 'An unstoppable read, a sexy and picaresque romp through the lesbian and queer demi-monde of the roaries Nineties' Independent on Sunday 'Waters is an extremely confident writer, combining precise, sensuous descriptions with irony and wit' Observer