
The Paying Guests
3.7 3.7 out of 5 stars | 18,980 ratings
Price: 19.69
Last update: 02-02-2025
About this item
From the best-selling author of The Little Stranger, an enthralling novel about a widow and her daughter who take a young couple into their home in 1920s London.
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' 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' finest achievement yet.
Top reviews from the United States

4.0 out of 5 stars A fast track novel, never a dull moment

5.0 out of 5 stars More than Just an English Mystery

3.0 out of 5 stars Five Star Writing, One Star for 100 pages worth of my time
At somewhere around the middle third of the book, she finally builds real tension and conflict, but even then, it builds a little too slowly. Finally, the book turns into an extremely great page-turner, a real lose-sleep section. Their are no cliches in this portion, as the tension is surprising and multi-layered.
I will read more of her, if her future work is trimmed up, and gets to the story faster. If not, this is the last work of her's that I will read.