The Paying Guests

Name: The Paying Guests
SKU: 106050
Availability: InStock

3.7 | 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.

Liliane Ruyters

A fast track novel, never a dull moment

Reviewed in the United States on November 30, 2014

One thing one can say about Sarah Waters, she knows how to write a fast track novel. Never a dull moment in The Paying Guests, which does not mean that we are lead from one exciting event to another. On the contrary, apart from a murder nothing much happens. The emotional turmoil however that is caused by two women falling in love is enormous. In The Paying Guests mother and daughter Wray have to accept two paying guests into their house; with hardly any income at all their debts are growing and growing, the rent can set them at ease. Daughter Frances grudgingly accepts the arrival of Liliane and Leonard Barber and tries to accommodate their presence into her life. At a certain point however she finds herself drawn towards Lilian Barber. At first she hides her feelings and does not let Lilian know that she is drawn to her. Then it becomes clear that Lilian has started to fall in love with Frances as well. The two indulge in a secret love affair, taking advantage of every second they are on their own. Frances allows herself to contemplate a future living with Lilian and shares these thoughts with her lover. Lilian at first doubts and cannot see herself leaving her family or her husband. After having spent a week of holidays with her husband she realises that she too wants to spend her life with Frances. Precisely at that moment they are caught by Leonard. In the hassle that ensues he gets hit with a heavy ash tray and dies. In the panic of the moment they hide the body, from that moment on their lives are determined by fear of discovery, of being split apart of not telling anybody the truth. The tension also makes Frances doubt her love for Lilian. When a young man is accused of having murdered Leonard both women have to face up to the fact that an innocent man might get the death sentence for a crime Lilian had committed. And having to face the fact that neither of them is brave enough to tell the truth. Frances is going through a turmoil of emotions which Waters describes in detail. One can feel Frances’ anguish exuding from the pages. Her emotions (fear, doubt, anger) are real and convincing. I could accept her doubting, worrying, fretting, missing and at the same time despising Lilian because any normal woman would have those emotions. It takes Waters’ talent to write it down in such a convincing way. When at the very end the jury declares the young man innocent Frances is relieved and anguished at the same time. She is convinced that Lilian will never look at her again. She however follows Frances and in meeting again under less stressful circumstances they both feel that there might be a future for them together. One cannot imagine fireworks and highly exuberant music accompanying this scene, it is tentative and therefore highly convincing. I loved The Paying Guests: it was an emotional rollercoaster thundering to its finale.

Linda Brooks

More than Just an English Mystery

Reviewed in the United States on April 15, 2019

Let me start by saying that I loved this book. I see there are quite a few 3, 2 and 1 star reviews, with various reasons given, and all I can say is that those reviewers just didn't get it. This is a prose-heavy book, written in the style of many authors of English mysteries (although this technically is not a mystery) and evocative of a bygone age, in this case, 1922 post-First World War. The widowed Mrs. Wray and her unmarried daughter, Frances, live in a formerly grand villa in an exclusive and high-class neighborhood of South London. Frances is in her late 20's and is unmarried, which in that day and time classified her as a "spinster". They have fallen on hard times financially following the death of Mr. Wray and the discovery that the had totally mismanaged and lost any fortunes they may have had. Mrs. Wray and Frances were first forced to dismiss their servants and cook and Frances took on the onerous task of maintaining the house. This was a time before modern cleaning products and appliances, and reading about Frances's routine household duties made me feel exhausted - just the necessary daily chores sound overwhelming today. They are finally at the point where they owe the grocer, the butcher and everyone else, and they make the decision to rent out part of the house, or in the parlance of the day, take in paying guests. Enter Lilian and Leonard Barber (Lil and Len), a young couple several years younger than Lilian. England adhered very strictly to a class system at that time and the Barbers, while a respectable couple, were members of the slightly lower "clerk class", despite Len's good-paying job and his salary advancements. This creates some major changes in the household - to provide a suite of rooms for the Barbers, Mrs. Wray is required to move her bedroom. Frances retains her bedroom on the same floor as the Barbers' rooms, and this necessitates sharing the landing with the couple. The house has no bathroom and an outhouse is located outside the kitchen, which requires the Barbers to go through the Wrays' kitchen to get to it. The only bathtub is also located off the kitchen - fortunately very few people bathed daily in that era. Frances handles most of the dealings with the Barbers. She finds Len agreeable, for the most part, but perceives a suggestive undertone in some of the things he says. She gradually becomes more and more friendly with Lil, and it slowly becomes apparent that this is becoming a romantic interest. I definitely don't want to put any spoilers in this review, because this is a story that unfolds slowly like a flower opening. Each delicately-nuanced development reveals a new aspect to the story until these events and prior events stand in a line like dominos just waiting for the slightest touch of a finger to bring everything crashing down. Frances at first appears sensible and no-nonsense, but slowly layers are peeled away to reveal a nervous, apprehensive and somewhat innocent young woman. Lil appears to be a somewhat flighty girl, insecure about her class status and obsequious to those of a "higher class" like the Wrays. As the blurb for the book states, there is a murder about halfway through the book and from that point, the suspense starts to build. I stayed awake half the night to finish the book. I had several possible endings in my mind, but never came near to guessing what actually happened. I found the ending satisfying. To those reviewers who felt there was "graphic sex", be assured that sex is only very lightly touched upon and not detailed. Those readers may have been offended by the lesbian overtones, but that element really only added to the suspense because of the prohibitions, both social and legal, against it in England in that era. I totally enjoyed the detailed descriptions of the locale, the day-to-day goings on in this period right after the war, with the return of a multitude of now-unemployed former soldiers, the habits and lives of the various "classes" and how people lived and dressed at that time. The day-to-day lives of the main characters and the dramatic events that overcame them were exciting and suspenseful. I definitely recommend this book to anyone who enjoys English mysteries and psychological thrillers.

Ron Johnson

Five Star Writing, One Star for 100 pages worth of my time

Reviewed in the United States on November 5, 2014

Ms. Waters obviously has prodigious writing talent. She writes like a poet. The first third of the book does very little to build tension and move things forward.She shows the hopelessness, the boredom, and the quiet desperation of the character, but she does this until it's unbearable. Page after page after page, does nothing but show the protagonist's tedious housework and lonely outings. She does this as though writing poetry, but enough already, I get it.

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.

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