The Little Stranger

by Sarah Waters

My most recent Sarah Waters novel, The Little Stranger, proves once again Waters possesses a rare gift for historical fiction as well as the ability to write an unnerving ghost story.

However, Waters describes the book not as a ghost story, but as a haunted house story, and it is the decaying grand manor house Hundreds Hall that looms over the novel and its protagonists. Whatever haunts Hundreds Hall is far stranger and more menacing than any ghost. Instead of setting the story during the Victorian era as she did for Fingersmith (my review here) and Tipping the Velvet, she chooses the early 1940s after WWII when England was undergoing significant social and financial changes. (Her excellent novel The Night Watch takes place during the same time period.) 

Our highly unreliable narrator is the well-intentioned, lonely doctor Farady, who first visited Hundreds Hall at the age of 10 in 1919. His mother worked as a parlor maid at the time and the Hall continues to fascinate him. Returning 30 years later to treat a servant he is shocked to find the once grand house falling apart, and its owners, the Ayers, struggling to hold onto a quickly dying way of life.

Dr. Faraday soon becomes involved (and slightly obsessed) with the various members of the Ayers family: the stately widow Mrs. Ayers; Roderick, her 24-year-old son wounded during the war; and her older unmarried daughter Caroline. As his relationship with the family deepens, sinister occurrences begin to plague the house and its inhabitants. 

Waters expertly plays on the issue of class as she did in her previous books. England is quickly changing, old families like the Ayers are forced to sell off their vast estates (often to newly built council houses) in order to survive. People from working class families, like Dr. Faraday, are gaining access to schools and money, creating a new middle class. One can't help but get the sense that the Ayers are being preyed upon not only by the mysterious happenings of their home, but by the swiftly changing social mores which seem to find them and their way of life archaic. 


The Little Stranger will draw you in while slowly upping the sense of unease, leading to the tragic conclusion. The perfect book for a cold winter's night.