The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters
The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters
36 Rating(s)
List: $27.50 | Sale: $19.25
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The Little Stranger

Author: Sarah Waters

Narrator: Simon Vance

Unabridged: 15 hr 50 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Penguin Audio

Published: 04/30/2009

Synopsis

Now a major motion picture directed by Lenny Abrahamson and starring Domhnall Gleeson and Ruth Wilson.

“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.

About The Author

Sarah Waters is the New York Times–bestselling author of The Little Stranger, The Night Watch, Fingersmith, Affinity, and Tipping the Velvet. She has three times been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, twice been a finalist for the Orange Prize, and was named one of Granta’s best young British novelists, among other distinctions. Waters lives in London.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Laura on May 22, 2009

If you are looking for a traditional horror novel, you won't find it in The Little Stranger. This book is not a variant on The Shining that just happens to be set in post-WWII Britain: it is essentially historical fiction that happens to have a touch of the supernatural about it. And as historical f......more

Goodreads review by karen on September 16, 2018

sigh. i tried to read this slowly and still finished it in two days. i suck. but i can't help it - she writes so well, and her stories are so damn compelling; the pages virtually turn themselves. but sorry, ladies, no lesbians this time. i never thought i would see the day. what else is sarah waters......more

Goodreads review by Margaret on October 31, 2011

Departing from her preferred 19th century context, as she did in her last book The Night Watch, Sarah Waters sets her latest novel in post-World War II Warwickshire and tries her hand at an Old Dark House, Haunted-Or-Is-It story in the Jamesian tradition of subtle, ambiguous psychological chillers (......more

Goodreads review by Paul on August 24, 2016

Any reader of Fingersmith will know how Sarah Waters drags the old tricks of ancient fiction out of retirement and makes them dance for us again. There it was Dickens and Wilkie Collins; here its Henry James and his Turn of the Screw, The Fall of the House of Usher, and any number of novels and movi......more

Goodreads review by Always on February 13, 2020

Dr. Faraday is called over to Hundreds Hall on summer day when someone on the estate falls ill. While there he strikes up a friendship with the family and in the coming months is pulled into their problems. Hundreds Hall is said to be haunted and as the months pass by it becomes more and more confus......more

Quotes

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

"A classic gothic page-turner."
—USA Today

“Wonderfully evoked…Waters has rendered the old house magnificently in its fading glory, and its in habitants sparkle like chandeliers in the damp, peeling rooms…Sarah Waters is an excellent, evocative writer, and this is an incredibly gripping and readable novel.”
—The New York Times Book Review  (Editor’s Choice)

“Haunted by the spirits of Henry James and Edgar Allan Poe…Waters is just one turn of the screw away from ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’ She keeps the lightening flashing in every gloomy chapter, and you can’t help but gasp, ‘It’s alive!’”
—The Washington Post 

“Completely absorbing…I wanted to linger in that fictional world, page by page, chapter by chapter.”
—Newsday 

“A virtuoso writer…If you want a ghost story that creeps up your spine, The Little Stranger delivers.”
—The Seattle Times 

“Waters has managed to write a near-perfect gothic novel while at the same time confidently deploying the form into fresher territory. It’s an astonishing performance, right down to the book’s mournful and devastating final sentence.”
—Laura Miller, Salon.com

“Waters creates an atmosphere of quiet dread that’s unnerving and compelling.”
—Time 

“With its subtly orchestrated suspense and spot-on portrayal of English class divisions, Waters’s literary ghost story delights.”
—People 

“A marvelous and truly spooky historical novel.”
—The Boston Globe

“Rich with historic detail and slow, deliberate building toward the revelation of its secrets, [The Little Stranger] delights even as it leaves you unnerved.”
—The Miami Herald 

“Like the gloomy English weather, an air of impending doom lingers over every chapter of The Little Stranger…an up-all-night page-turner that provides a cogent dose of social commentary.”
—The Cleveland Plain Dealer 

“In The Little Stranger, Hundreds Hall serves as a perfect symbol of the postwar erosion of Britain’s class hierarchies, but it also, increasingly, transforms into a scheming, deadly character…Waters, a master at stoking anticipation, withholds the truth about her ghost until the final pages. By then we already strongly suspect its identity, but the confirmation is subtle, surprising, and deeply, deeply chilling.”
—NPR.org

“A stunning haunted house tale whose ghosts are as horrifying as any in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Few authors do dread as well as Waters. Her latest novel is a ghost story with elements of both ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ and Brideshead Revisited. This spooky satisfying read has the added pleasure of effectively detailing postwar village life, with its rationing, social structures, and gossip, all on the edge of Britain’s massive change to a social state.”
—Library Journal     
 

Awards

  • Booker Prize
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