Sarah Waters is our ‘Writers Creating Awareness’ favourite for the month, and that is with good reason. The novelist, best known for her novels set in Victorian society and featuring lesbian protagonists, such as Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith, is back with a new book ‘The Paying Guests’. This week The Bookseller previewer Alice O’Keeffe dubbed the new novel “gripping tale of class, sex and the consequences of a passionate affair” and “indisputably at the top of her game”.
About the book – Well, it is set in 1922, and the backdrop of 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. When Len and Lillian move in, Frances begins a tentative friendship with the latter, which soon grows into a full-blown affair.
The Paying Guest has taken Waters four years to write. The author told The Bookseller:
“I slowed down a bit because I had to get to know the period and [it] always takes time to feel at home in a period. There was more research than I’d had to do for the last book (The Little Stranger, 2009); I already knew the 1940s quite well. It was a much more challenging book to write than the last one, which was a very straightforward haunted house story. Even though there’s a strong plot to it, it’s quite character-driven.”
Waters also said:
“I always use lesbian desire to sort of upset something that we are familiar with. So with the other novels it would be taking a Victorian scenario that has been done to death a million times and putting lesbians into it and seeing what that does to it. With this novel it was a similar adventure.”
