Affinity, Sarah Waters
Affinity, Sarah Waters
1 Rating(s)
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Affinity

Author: Sarah Waters

Narrator: Juanita McMahon

Unabridged: 15 hr 3 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 01/27/2012


Synopsis

In the shadows of Victorian London, a tale of obsession and redemption unfolds.  Margaret Prior, an upper-class woman recovering from a suicide attempt, has begun visiting the women’s ward of Millbank prison, Victorian London’s grimmest jail, as part of her rehabilitative charity work. Amongst Millbank’s murderers and common thieves, Margaret finds herself increasingly fascinated by an apparently innocent inmate, the enigmatic spiritualist Selina Dawes.  Selina was imprisoned after a séance she was conducting went horribly awry, leaving an elderly matron dead and a young woman deeply disturbed. Although initially skeptical of Selina’s gifts, Margaret is soon drawn into a twilight world of ghosts and shadows, unruly spirits and unseemly passions, until she is at last driven to concoct a desperate plot to secure Selina’s freedom, and her own. As in her noteworthy debut, Tipping the Velvet, Sarah Waters brilliantly evokes the sights and smells of a moody and beguiling nineteenth-century London, and proves herself yet again a storyteller, in the words of the New York Times Book Review, of “startling power.” “Unfolds sinuously and ominously … a powerful plot-twister … a truly suspenseful tale of terror; and a piece of elegant, thinly veiled erotica. Like a Ouija board, Affinity offers different messages to different readers, scaring the shrouds off everyone in the process.”—USA Today

About Sarah Waters

Sarah Waters has written six novels: Tipping the Velvet (1998, Betty Trask Award); Affinity (1999, Somerset Maugham Award, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award); Fingersmith (2002, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize, and winner of the South Bank Show Award for Literature and the CWA Historical Dagger); The Night Watch (2006, shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Man Booker Prize); The Little Stranger (2009, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the South Bank Show Literature Award) and The Paying Guests (2014, shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction). She was included in Granta's prestigious list of 'Best of Young British Novelists 2003', and in the same year was voted Author of the Year at the British Book Awards and the BA Conference, and won the Waterstones Author of the Year Award. In April 2015 she joined the Council of the Society of Authors.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Wendy Darling on April 09, 2016

In reading the gothic psychological novel Affinity, it is nearly impossible to shake off an overwhelming feeling of gloom and pervasive dread. Following a failed suicide attempt, a young "lady visitor" named Margaret Prior develops a relationship with an inmate named Selina Dawes in a Victorian wome......more

Goodreads review by Ellie on February 10, 2024

Sarah Waters is one of my favourite authors. I'm savouring each book of hers, she portrays gothic atmosphere perfectly for me, I really enjoyed this! but the pacing could be quicker for my personal taste and I wasn't keen on the ending 😭......more

Goodreads review by Katie on March 28, 2019

I absolutely adored this. Sarah Waters is such an incredible writer and fast becoming one of my favourites. The plotting is brilliant, the themes fascinating, the historical world building spot on, and the charactisation impeccable. Would highly recommend!!......more

Goodreads review by Vonia on September 09, 2017

I have said it before, I will say it again. I cannot fathom how Sarah Waters does it, how she can draw the reader into this entirely other world, this other period, time, place, complete immersion. Even something simple like the protagonist Miss Prior's afternoon in The Spiritualists' Reading Room i......more

Goodreads review by Janelle on September 17, 2021

Oh wow, that was so good! I haven’t read Sarah Waters before and I will definitely be reading more. Set in the early 1870s in London, Margaret Prior, recovering from a suicide attempt after the death of her father, starts visiting the female prisoners in Milbank prison and becomes obsessed with one,......more