A Little Stranger
-
- £5.99
-
- £5.99
Publisher Description
Daisy needs to hire a new nanny for her son; the efficient and capable Margaret Pride appears to be the perfect candidate. But as Daisy becomes increasingly removed from family life and the nanny becomes more prominent, oddities in Margaret's behaviour soon surface.
Masterfully constructed and crackling with tension, A Little Stranger reveals that self-deception can be just as dangerous as the deceit of others.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A contemporary The Turn of the Screw , McWilliam's slim second novel (after A Case of Knives ) did very well in England, but may be less successful here. There is no mistaking, however, that this is the work of a talented writer. Precisely articulated, carefully structured and tightly controlled, the story is narrated by Daisy, the young wife of a rich man living on a country estate, who hires Margaret Price as a nanny for her little boy. Addicted to wearing cute clothes decorated with adorable animals, Margaret seems an exemplary nanny, even, Daisy convinces herself, ``perfection.'' In the languid torpor of a new pregnancy, complicated by a deep-seated depression about her place in the world and ``a perverse will to be polite at any cost,'' Daisy blinds herself to the dangerous character of super-efficient, humorless Margaret--until it is almost too late. McWilliam gives Daisy a sardonic voice, appropriate to her trenchant asides about behavior in the top strata of British society; these mordant observations grant the novel its edge. Although tautly measured to achieve mounting tension, the narrative is, in the end, a little too mannered and pretentious, and Daisy too self-centered to win the reader's sympathy.
