The Little Stranger - Sarah Waters

The Little Stranger

By Sarah Waters

  • Release Date: 2009-04-30
  • Genre: Literary Fiction
Score: 4
4
From 189 Ratings

Description

Soon to be a major motion picture, directed by Lenny Abrahamson and starring Domhnall Gleeson and Ruth Wilson.

"The #1 book of 2009...Several sleepless nights are guaranteed."—Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly


One postwar summer in his home of rural Warwickshire, Dr. Faraday, the son of a maid who has built a life of quiet respectability as a country physician, is called to a patient at lonely Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the Georgian house, once impressive and handsome, is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable yard permanently fixed at twenty to nine. Its owners—mother, son, and daughter—are struggling to keep pace with a changing society, as well as with conflicts of their own. But are the Ayreses haunted by something more sinister than a dying way of life? Little does Dr. Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become intimately entwined with his.

Reviews

  • The little stranger

    1
    By 06460
    Not reasonable and bizarre! Kill,kill,kill! Don't waste your time
  • good but disappointing for at Water’s novel

    3
    By archetype67
    A good old fashioned ghost story set in an old decaying family home following the Second World War. Generally, I really enjoy Waters' books, but this feel short. While the period was well drawn, and the characters fitting, I never connected with them the way I did in her previous novels. I kept wanting more but everything seemed so distant. The book was in the mold of Hawthorne, Poe, and evoked shades of Brontë's Wuthering Heights, including a narrator that befriends the family and tells the tale to the audience, but again, everything seemed to be a pale echo. For the most part Waters does a decent job with the atmosphere but I am not sure whether the rationalizing events helped or hurt the novel and unlike in some of her previous novels, Waters didn't have a twist here. Not a bad read, but somewhat disappointing.
  • Okay but not too scary

    2
    By jenniferstribling
    Yawn. Many scary elements unique to this book, but read more like a screenplay.
  • Worth reading but...

    4
    By Reading ladybug
    It was enjoyable and certainly had it's high points, but it should have been about 400 pages instead of 500...long-winded writer. A little anticlimactic at points but overall good. Like "Grey Gardens" set in England.
  • I guess I liked it

    4
    By Rgx ate the cat
    I don't think this novel is anywhere close to how great "The Night Watch" was. I liked the social issues this novel portrayed, the imagery, and the symbolisms used. However, I often found the unreliable narrator irritating, missing the obvious so often. Maybe I'm supposed to find him annoying. Sometimes the plot drifted into being too much of a haunted house story. I'm not into that. Nonetheless, once I got about halfway through, I couldn't put it down. I'll continue to read everything she writes.
  • Haunting

    5
    By Veebis
    In the best sense. Not her best, perhaps (Affinity!), but certainly a welcome addition to an impressive and ever-refining sensibility.