The Paying Guests
shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction
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4.3 • 9 Ratings
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- €5.49
Publisher Description
'A page-turning melodrama and a fascinating portrait of London on the verge of great change' Guardian
It is 1922, and in a hushed south London villa life is about to be transformed, as genteel widow Mrs Wray and her discontented daughter Frances are obliged to take in lodgers. Lilian and Leonard Barber, a modern young couple of the 'clerk class', bring with them gramophone music, colour, fun - and dangerous desires. The most ordinary of lives, it seems, can explode into passion and drama... A love story that is also a crime story, this is vintage Sarah Waters.
'Another wild ride of a novel... magnetic storytelling' Tracy Chevalier, Observer
'You will be hooked within a page' Charlotte Mendelson, Financial Times
'Sumptuous... the writing is impeccable. A joy in every respect' New Statesman
'An unsurpassed fictional recorder of vanished eras and hidden lives' Sunday Times
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The bestselling Welsh author of The Night Watch and Fingersmith returns with an evocative novel set in ’20s London. In the aftermath of World War I, an eccentric young woman named Frances and her grieving mother are forced to take in lodgers to make ends meet. Those paying guests—vivacious Lilian Barber and her husband Len—turn Frances’ world upside down, ushering in an unexpected friendship and, ultimately, profound heartbreak.
