Waiting on Wednesday: The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters

Waiting on Wednesday is hosted by Breaking the Spine, a great place to geek out over upcoming books!

My pick for this week is The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters, to be published in September by Riverhead. And why? Because Waters is a stunning author - Fingersmith is possibly my favourite non-SFF book ever, The Night Watch was beautiful and melancholy, and her other books are awesome too. And this one! I was a bit worried when I first read the blurb – it doesn’t make it clear that there are lesbians in it, and her last novel, The Little Strangers, didn’t have any queer content – but apparently she’s not making this a trend. Plus all the reviews have said glowing things about both the romance and the overall tension in this book. I seriously can’t wait.


From the bestselling author of The Little Stranger and Fingersmith, 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’s 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’s finest achievement yet.