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The Little Stranger |  | Author: Sarah Waters
Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
Category: Book
List Price: $26.95
Buy Used: $2.81
as of 9/3/2010 18:34 CDT details
You Save: $24.14 (90%)
Seller: seattlegoodwill
Rating:  reviews
Media: Hardcover
Edition: First Edition
Pages: 480
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.7
ISBN: 1594488800
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9781594488801
ASIN: 1594488800
Publication Date: April 30, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Features:
| • | ISBN13: 9781594488801 | | • | Condition: New | | • | Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
A chilling and vividly rendered ghost story set in postwar Britain, by the bestselling and award-winning author of The Night Watch and Fingersmith.
Sarah Waters's trilogy of Victorian novels Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, and Fingersmith earned her legions of fans around the world, a number of awards, and a reputation as one of today's most gifted historical novelists. With her most recent book, The Night Watch, Waters turned to the 1940s and delivered a tender and intricate novel of relationships that brought her the greatest success she has achieved so far. With The Little Stranger, Waters revisits the fertile setting of Britain in the 1940s-and gives us a sinister tale of a haunted house, brimming with the rich atmosphere and psychological complexity that have become hallmarks of Waters's work.
The Little Stranger follows the strange adventures of Dr. Faraday, the son of a maid who has built a life of quiet respectability as a country doctor. One dusty postwar summer in his home of rural Warwickshire, he is called to a patient at Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for more than two centuries, the Georgian house, once grand 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. But are the Ayreses haunted by something more ominous than a dying way of life? Little does Dr. Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become entwined with his.
Abundantly atmospheric and elegantly told, The Little Stranger is Sarah Waters's most thrilling and ambitious novel yet.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Faraday September 2, 2010
Ravel (Montréal, Québec Canada)
(I'm almost at the end of the book, and I wish not to spoil my review of it by knowing the end. However, there is so many reviews here that I'll simply add a few notes of my own...).
Faraday. Oh, Faraday! Even if you were the narrator and then, just one character among the principal characters, I came to despise you. (credit to the author of this marvelous well written book). Somehow, all that happens is part of your fault. You are in post-War, post-Victorian England and you act like the worst blind scientist ever. Never, ever heard of spiritualism? It was quite the rage a few years ago. You could at least have taken some of the hints among all the things happening at Hundreds. (at that, I add that for a strong-minded woman, Caroline is not very good at convincing you of the supernatural stuff happenings to her and her family -- Waters made her a bit too feeble there and not quite believable).
Sarah Waters: was it intentional to make a paraphrase - much bigger - of Henry James' Turn of the Screw?
Don't take me wrong: I adore this book. I was wondering when I could read something as strong and well written as DuMaurier's Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel. Incredible!
But Faraday is making me very mad. He's choosing to be blind and I'm mad at him to finally be so stupid and mentally so undernourished.
Now, I go the read the end of it.
 House calls August 22, 2010
Linda (CT, United States)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The Little Stranger is a deliciously creepy tale in which the star is a house, a grand but decrepit country estate in Warwickshire, England. The year is 1947, and in the aftermath of WWII, all of the English, rich and poor alike, are suffering through what today we like to call tough economic times. The story begins with a house call made by Dr. Faraday to Hundreds, the seat of the Ayres family for 200 years. The doctor, now middle aged, has misty memories of visiting Hundreds as a child with his mother, former nanny to the Ayres children, now all grown up and struggling desperately to hang on to their heritage. They befriend Faraday, to as close an extent as is possible between the upper and lower classes.
Little by little, strange little incidents are noticed, such as sooty smudges and childish graffiti appearing on the walls. Rod Ayres, the heir to the estate, begins to experience frightening, seemingly paranormal visions. Tapping, whistling, and whispering sounds are noted by the family, and Mrs. Ayres feels certain that her long dead little daughter is trying to communicate with her. The family turns to Faraday for help, but he is a modern man of science, and refuses to fall prey to the fanciful fears of the Ayreses. Along the way, he inexplicably falls in love with Caroline, Rod's sister.
Author Waters artfully beguiles her readers into entering a sort of gothic puzzle, where things may or may not be what they seem. How much of a role does the psychology of the family, now destitute after centuries of comfort, play in the manifestations that plague them? How much of a role does it play in the choices made by Dr. Faraday, who desperately wants to make his mark in the world, and rise above his family origins? The final paragraph in this fable is devastating, and I'm still not sure how to answer those questions, nor have I made up my mind about the "little stranger" who plays the malevolent tricks. But I do know that The Little Stranger is a hauntingly good story.
Not What I Expected, Better August 15, 2010
Ronald Hammond (Key West, FL USA)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
In this ghost story that takes place just after the Great War, the family in a British Manor House called the Hundreds seems to be confronted by the house itself. It's almost as if the house is the ghost and for me that made for delicious reading, because I really love a good ghost story. Who doesn't?
This is a Gothic type tale about a family and a house that are falling apart. Mrs. Aires, the matriarch, seems to be living in the past. Son Roddy, who was severely wounded during the war, seems to be coming apart because he's unable to handle the responsibility of running the estate. Daughter Caroline, no beauty, is a spinster who seems to be more in love with her dog than anybody else. Then there is the parlor maid, fourteen-year-old Betty, who seems to know there is an evil present in the house.
Now throw in Dr. Faraday, a single man from a poor family, who has long had a fascination for the estate and who doesn't believe in ghosts or evil houses and you have the makings of a good story. Dr. Faraday comes to the house when Betty fakes an illness and winds up becoming a frequent guest and trusted family friend. However, when Roddy trust him with tales of the evil in the house, Faraday violates that trust and has him committed.
One by one the house seems to go after those who live there and in the end it changes them, and though he would never admit it, Faraday is changed too. The ghost, or the house, or whatever it is, is a fascinating character all by itself and this is a fascinating book. Not what I expected. Better.
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