A Haunting Little Stranger from Sarah Waters
Sarah Waters will be reading from and talking about The Little Stranger at the University Bookstore on Tuesday, May 5, at 7 p.m.
British author Sarah Waters has finally returned with her fifth, long-awaited novel, The Little Stranger, and we loved every single suspense-filled moment of it. Waters' first three novels (Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, and Fingersmith) take place in the Victorian era. Her ever-popular novel The Night Watch is, like The Little Stranger, set in post-WWII Britain.
This latest novel is a thick one, but don't let that get you down. Once you pick it up, you're easily hooked and we promise you'll be up late and canceling plans with friends on a Friday night just to see what might happen next.
The Little Stranger has been dubbed a ghost story--but with Waters being known as such an incredible historical novelist, this book has much more to offer than a few roaming spooks. It tells a very realistic tale of the collapse of Britain's aristocratic class following the war, and of those stuck on the idea of old money while no longer having any, but still doing everything in their power to still seem lordly to others.
We first meet the narrator, Dr. Faraday, in the stately Hundreds Hall, when he is a child. At the age of ten, he visits the Hall where his mother was once a parlor maid to the elegant Ayres family and returns, by chance, thirty years later as the country doctor. He is shocked by the declining condition of the home and property that he remembered so well as being grand and beautiful: "[T]he park was now so overgrown and untended, my small car had to fight its way down the drive. When I broke free of the bushes at last and found myself on a sweep of lumpy gravel with the Hall directly ahead of me, I put on the brake, and gaped in dismay."
Faraday becomes obsessed with the Hall and the remaining Ayres family--Mrs. Ayres and her two grown children Roderick and Caroline, and from there on, very strange things begin to happen. We'd hate to spoil anything else that follows, so we'll leave it at that, and hope you enjoy all of the chilling surprises that we did.
