Synopsis
About Sarah Waters
See more books from this AuthorAn exquisitely tuned exploration of class in post-Edwardian Britain—with really hot sex...Waters keeps getting better, if that’s even possible after the sheer perfection of her earlier novels.
Read Full Review of The Paying Guests | See more reviews from KirkusWhen Frances and Lily confront their radically altered existence, the narrative culminates in a breathtaking denouement. British writer Waters (The Little Stranger) deserves a large audience.
Read Full Review of The Paying Guests | See more reviews from Publishers WeeklyPerhaps Waters’s most impressive accomplishment is the authentic feel she achieves, that the telling — whether in its serious, exciting, comic or sexy passages — has no modern tinge.
Read Full Review of The Paying Guests | See more reviews from NY Timeswhat begins life as a sharply observed domestic set piece slowly morphs into a courtroom drama. Waters combines a gripping thriller with period detail evoked with a faultless fluidity.
Read Full Review of The Paying Guests | See more reviews from GuardianTwice in the last few pages I shouted aloud – though whether in joy or horror I will not tell you. Sarah Waters skilfully keeps you guessing to the end.
Read Full Review of The Paying Guests | See more reviews from GuardianWaters's plain-spoken description of this relationship immediately begins to undermine the novel's integrity as a period piece: the sexual perspective is designed for the modern reader...and the novel's descent into melodrama as a murder is committed...turns this engaging literary endeavour into a tiresome soap opera.
Read Full Review of The Paying Guests | See more reviews from GuardianFor about the last ten years British writing has been experiencing a remarkable renaissance in literary fiction. Long may this movement flourish. Sarah Waters stands among the leaders. And this is one reader who cannot wait for her next book.
Read Full Review of The Paying Guests | See more reviews from NY Journal of BooksThe pressure that remorse and moral responsibility bring to bear on their love affair is unpacked with exquisite pathos, so that whether their relationship will survive at all remains uncertain until the very last paragraph. It is a finely tweaked conclusion to an unnerving novel in which, in the end, almost everyone pays.
Read Full Review of The Paying Guests | See more reviews from WSJ online...this is a magnificent creation, a book that doubles as a time machine, flinging us back not only to postwar London, but also to our own lost love affairs, the kind that left us breathless — and far too besotted to notice that we had somehow misplaced our moral compass.
Read Full Review of The Paying Guests | See more reviews from NPRThe Paying Guests is one of those big novels you hate to see end — especially since you sense the end might be a very nasty one, indeed.
Read Full Review of The Paying Guests | See more reviews from NPRDespite its twists and turns, the climactic courtroom scene sags. Everywhere else the drama is taut. Another gripping and atmospheric triumph from one of Britain’s finest storytellers.
Read Full Review of The Paying Guests | See more reviews from Star Tribune...The Paying Guests reminds us of every great novel we’ve gasped or winced at, or loudly urged the protagonists through, and it does not relent...There is too much here to convey in brief, or without revealing the switchback twists that make all Waters’ novels dazzling.
Read Full Review of The Paying Guests | See more reviews from Financial TimesTHE PAYING GUESTS grabbed me by the throat immediately and would not leave me alone until I had devoured every word. In other words, it is the very definition of a gripping page-turner.
Read Full Review of The Paying Guests"I pay attention to women's history," Waters said in a recent interview. "To their secret history and lives." "The Paying Guests" illuminates these lives brilliantly and unforgettably.
Read Full Review of The Paying Guests | See more reviews from LA Times...as vivid and continuous dreams go, this is a beautifully imagined one. It speaks to history, to identity, and to the basic human desire to be seen not for what you appear to be, but for who you really are.
Read Full Review of The Paying Guests | See more reviews from Globe and Mail...with The Paying Guests, Waters has not only crafted a vivid portrait of class dissolution in post-WWI London, but also a look at the achingly human need for a sense of purpose and, if we’re lucky, a little intimacy.
Read Full Review of The Paying Guests | See more reviews from AV ClubThe superbly talented Sarah Waters — three times shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize — leads her readers into hidden worlds, worlds few of us knew existed. And so it is with The Paying Guests.
Read Full Review of The Paying Guests | See more reviews from Toronto Star...she deserves far more attention in this country for her perceptive storytelling, and The Paying Guests — a novel of manners as well as a novel of passion — should win her a mass American audience.
Read Full Review of The Paying Guests...I devoured it whole upon arrival and then re-read my favourite scenes several times more after that.
Read Full Review of The Paying Guests | See more reviews from National Post artsSome novels are so good, so gripping or shattering that they leave you uncertain whether you should have ever started them. You open “The Paying Guests” and immediately surrender to the smooth assuredness of Sarah Waters’s silken prose. Nothing jars. You relax. You turn more pages. You start turning them faster.
Read Full Review of The Paying GuestsPerhaps Waters does not want to put on a fireworks display of plot surprises. She does give us a poignant love story which symbolically sees in the death of the old order, the death of the old-fashioned husband and maybe the birth of an era of love without secrets. Yet we find ourselves wishing for a few more fireworks all the same.
Read Full Review of The Paying GuestsI read the topsy turvey courtroom denouement with genuine wonder at the virtuosity of its unravelling, the emotional subtlety of its implications about how people linger in others. Such intelligence is indeed thrilling.
Read Full Review of The Paying Guests...at the novel’s end, after its dramatic plot resolution, Waters allows us the faintest hope that this not-so-brave new world may have a tiny corner for Frances after all.
Read Full Review of The Paying GuestsWith the swiftly shifting mores of postwar British society as a backdrop, Waters once again provides a singular novel of psychological tension, emotional depth and historical detail.
Read Full Review of The Paying GuestsWaters holds a doctorate in English literature, and she brings a cultural historian’s gift for research to her work.
Read Full Review of The Paying Guests...Waters has shown she can layer her novels in such thought-provoking ways, The Paying Guests seems a bit thin. There wasn’t a dull moment in it, but in the end I was almost bored by it.
Read Full Review of The Paying GuestsThis is a fever dream of a novel — Waters' best — that will leave you all wrung out. Perhaps, like Frances, in desperate need of a cigarette.
Read Full Review of The Paying GuestsThe novel’s conclusion when it arrives is satisfying, if slightly predictable and the loose ends are nicely tied. A great rainy day read, The Paying Guests is raunchy, romantic and thoroughly entertaining.
Read Full Review of The Paying GuestsThe Paying Guests is a beautiful and brilliant work by a consummate storyteller. Sarah Waters is, quite simply, one of our greatest writers.
Read Full Review of The Paying GuestsAfter 2009’s The Little Stranger—a classic haunted-house novel set in 1949 that actually contains less Sapphic tension than models like The Haunting of Hill House or Rebecca—the erotic charge of The Paying Guests marks something of a return to form.
Read Full Review of The Paying GuestsWaters expertly evokes doomed love, terror and regret as she examines just how far we’ll go for a chance at happiness.
Read Full Review of The Paying GuestsHaving adeptly raised such questions, "The Paying Guests" seems unsure how to answer them. Perhaps such reticence — in Frances, Lilian and postwar England itself — is inevitable, in a novel poised between an old world dying away and a new one struggling to be born.
Read Full Review of The Paying GuestsIn true Waters' style, "The Paying Guests" is filled with romance and sex, suspense and deceit. Her prose is as strong as ever. She brings her characters and her settings to remarkable life...
Read Full Review of The Paying GuestsWith pitch-perfect dialogue and period detail, Waters delivers a melodrama that foreshadows a feminist future.
Read Full Review of The Paying GuestsIn Waters’s reinterpretation, the wife’s lover is a woman, and the implications of the closeted lesbian affair play into the surprising resolution of the case. But while this book involves a criminal trial, most of its suspense is psychological...
Read Full Review of The Paying GuestsWaters is an ace storyteller and a remarkable re-builder of the past. The Paying Guests is a page-turner with a twisting plot, but it is also a psychologically intense examination of what it is like to live with a secret and grapple with consequences...
Read Full Review of The Paying GuestsThe Paying Guests isn’t perfect. The “vintage” elements of Waters are beginning to blur slightly into predictability and the last section loses some pacing. But it’s powerful, and Waters’ plunging of new depths in her characters’ relationships is a welcome refreshment...
Read Full Review of The Paying GuestsSarah Waters has forged an admirable reputation as a writer of historical fiction; THE PAYING GUESTS is very likely the best of a string of remarkable novels. It is certainly the best book I've read in a long, long time.
Read Full Review of The Paying GuestsWhen all is said and done, The Paying Guests is a disappointment. Readers who are fans of Ms. Waters’ previous novels will miss the little Gothic touches she typically adds to her stories. The amount of words and space devoted to microscopic examinations of Frances’ feelings and resentments stultifies the story...
Read Full Review of The Paying GuestsIt’s meticulously crafted and beautifully written and is just delicious to read from beginning to end. If you enjoy long historical novels that are brimming with atmosphere, then you should absolutely pick up any of Sarah Waters’ novels immediately.
Read Full Review of The Paying Guestsn the second half of the novel the action takes a disturbing turn. The protagonists have a whole new reality with which to cope, and we readers must endure every twist and turn of their thinking. Yes, it’s masterfully done, but again, it’s done for too long. And I, for one, found the ending profoundly unsatisfying.
Read Full Review of The Paying GuestsDo not be discouraged if the novel seems to be losing momentum around the halfway mark, as things do get a very thorough shake-up before long. Waters’s intricately weaved and suspense-filled plot ultimately makes for an engaging and satisfying read.
Read Full Review of The Paying Guests...“The Paying Guests” offers more than love, sex, death, detectives, and Frances’s agonized ruminations thereupon (though, really, what more could you want?). It is also a piercing portrait of a character and time marked by the dramatic social transitions capped by the Great War.
Read Full Review of The Paying GuestsOnce I became unconvinced about the emotional honesty of Frances’s character, then the book simply dragged for me. What might have been exquisite detail instead became slow and petty, even irritating.
Read Full Review of The Paying GuestsSomehow The Paying Guests was on track to being another great novel by Waters but for me, it fell a little short. Maybe someone new to Sarah Waters would enjoy this one more, as it gives a little tamer introduction to what this author does best.
Read Full Review of The Paying Guests...what Waters has given us, as well as being an involving, exciting novel of action and an intense portrayal of character, is an expert depiction of one facet of the decade.
Read Full Review of The Paying GuestsLots of fiction explores these kinds of stories, and Waters does it well here. But readers who are looking for her trademark twisty plots might come away disappointed.
Read Full Review of The Paying GuestsWhilst the final third of proceedings doesn’t quite maintain the momentum of the novel’s opening (Frances becomes somewhat dour and a creeping sameness overtakes some of the ruminative passages), it remains a thoroughly satisfying, entertaining read.
Read Full Review of The Paying Guests...this is an enjoyable book, and you should definitely give it a go, especially if you're already accustomed to Waters's style.
Read Full Review of The Paying GuestsThis was my first read of her fiction, and I admit surprise that she is so widely hailed by mainstream readers. Such a long book requires days of attention, and that darkness stays with one long after. Her roster of critical successes speaks to her talent.
Read Full Review of The Paying GuestsThe book is a page turner in the best sense of the phrases. At times my involvement with the book was so great I had to put it down and go and do something else to clear my head and remind myself that the characters and events described were fictional creations!
Read Full Review of The Paying GuestsThe book is excellent. I would have given it 5 stars were it not for the bit of obvious deception in the general review about the plot driven tale centered around the unexpected love affair. While the ending was credible, the outcome may not be what the reader would think of as true justice.
Read Full Review of The Paying GuestsThe Paying Guests is one of those big novels you hate to see end — especially since you sense the end might be a very nasty one, indeed.
Read Full Review of The Paying GuestsThe first three hundred pages of Guests belong to Charles Dickens, but the rest of the book reads like pure, uncut Patricia Highsmith. Waters brings the best of those disparate muses together and convinces them to dance to the tune of her beautiful music.
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