The Paying Guests

By Sarah Waters

Book Overview

The "volcanically sexy" ( USA Today ) bestseller about a widow and her daughter who take a young couple into their home in 1920s London. It is 1922, and London is tense. Ex-servicemen are disillusioned; the out-of-work and the hungry are demanding change. And in South London, in a genteel Camberwell villa--a large, silent house now bereft of brothers, husband, and even servants--life is about to be transformed, as impoverished widow Mrs. Wray and her spinster daughter, Frances, are obliged to take in lodgers. With the arrival of Lilian and Leonard Barber, a modern young couple of the "clerk class," the routines of the house will be shaken up in unexpected ways. Little do the Wrays know just how profoundly their new tenants will alter the course of Frances's life--or, as passions mount and frustration gathers, how far-reaching, and how devastating, the disturbances will be. Short-listed for the Man Booker Prize three times, Sarah Waters has earned a reputation as one of our greatest writers of historical fiction.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1594633924
• ISBN13: 9781594633928
• Release Date: September 2015
• Publisher: Riverhead Books
• Length: 592 Pages
• Weight: 0.97 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.1" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Slow and incredibly frustrating

This book took so long to get to tha main plot point and just completely fell off afterwards. The writing is really good which is why I even remember it but I hated the characters and the plot. I painfully finished it with steam coming out of my ears. Don't dead this if you enjoy a happy ending.

Very slow

This book is an absolute chore to read. I trudged through 120 pages with no action of any kind and I finally gave up. I love period piece drama and this book sounded like something I would enjoy but it was just plain boring.

Great read

I purchased this book long ago and finally got around to reading it after reviewing the back several times and deciding it didn't sound very interesting, or deciding against it based on the length of the book. If only I'd known this was such a fascinating book; totally captured my attention... This is a somewhat scandalous read for 20s-30s (and up). Pleasantly surprised...