The Little Stranger

By: Sarah Waters

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 15 hrs and 49 mins

Publisher's summary

A chilling and vividly rendered ghost story set in postwar Britain, by the best-selling 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 20 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.

©2009 Sarah Waters (P)2009 Penguin

Critic reviews

"Waters has boldly reassigned all these gothic motifs [of the traditional ghost story] from their usual Freudian duties to another detail entirely: The Little Stranger is about class, and the unavoidable yet lamentable price paid when venerable social hierarchies begin to erode. … Waters has managed to write a near-perfect gothic novel while at the same time confidently deploying the form into fresher territory." (Salon.com)
"[A] marvelous and truly spooky historical novel. … As a strange spot on an old and mouldering ceiling takes on a sinister appearance and bodies begin to accumulate, Waters’s precise and chilling prose lets Dr. Faraday have his way with the story." ( Boston Globe)
"Waters (The Night Watch) reflects on the collapse of the British class system after WWII in a stunning haunted house tale whose ghosts are as horrifying as any in Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House....Faraday, one of literature's more unreliable narrators, carries the reader swiftly along to the devastating conclusion." ( Publishers Weekly)

Phenomenal. A really unusual ghost story.

Don't watch the movie first, don't read a summary. this is a masterfully written book.

...the little stranger...

Amazing. Beautifully done. But: It wasn’t until I finished the book, and realized WHAT I had just read, that I became at all truly creeped out. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t quit mulling it over. A re-read is a must to fully realize the story. That’s all I can say, and I’m bursting to keep it in. This is a brilliant mystery you’ll miss entirely of you take it for “just” a ghost story.

Left Me Feeling Sad and Down

I loved the writing style, most of the story, the narrator was fantastic, but the ending was unsatisfying. Still, it was very interesting to read about how life was in post-war Europe. I learned a lot.

Okay but not her best.........

I listened, and was engaged but afterwards wasnt sure whether it was worth my 15 hour investment or not. As always with a Waters book, it was very well written, but I just wasnt sure about the ending, some how it just wasnt satisfying for me.
If you are starting out with Sarah Waters and you have any interest in the 2nd world war and the home front in England consider starting off with the Night Watch which I felt said a lot more about people and the challenges that life can throw at them.

Spooky

I enjoyed this audio book immensely, but I'm not quite sure how to describe it. It is set in post WWII england in a once glorious stately home. It is part period drama, part mystery. psychological thriller and ghost story. It is also a study of human nature and family dynamics. Sarah Waters is an absolute genius of setting and atmosphere and I was riveted by the story. Thats not to say that it was fast paced because it was anything but, there were moments at the beginning of the book that I wondered if anything was ever going to actually happen. Many things did happen... horrible things, but in the aftermath of those events and horrifying occurences I never quite knew what was behind the strangeness. Was it something supernatural? Or was it something much worse? Regardless. I won't be making a trip to Hundreds Hall anytime soon. And the narrator, Dr Farady, what is his deal???? Was he as he seemed? Good Grief! What a great example of an unreliable narrator. When the book ended. I was both satisfied and frustrated, and now two days later I am still thinking of the story and wondering...

I believe the audio version enhanced my experience of this book. The reader, Simon Vance, was excellent at evoking the no nonsense Dr Farraday and creating suspense with his performance. The story surrounded me and took hold in a way that might not have happened with the printed page. I truly felt as if I was listening to a man describing the darkest years of his life. I cant wait til someone I know reads this book. I'd love to know who they think "The Little Stranger" is.(less)

My kind of horror story

Really enjoyed this- the story moves slowly through the year and deeply into the lives of the characters , but little by little you begin to suspect... what exactly? That’s for you to decide!

Riding a local train

Listening to this book reminded me of riding a train with frequent local stops. No sooner do you seem to get moving when the train halts at a station. You sit there while people get on and off the train and thing happen at the station. Eventually the train gets underway again, but in no time pulls into another station. Fifteen hours later, at a station just like all the rest, the conductor announces, "End of the line; everybody off the train!" And there you are: surprised at the journey's end, because you really haven't gotten anywhere. The writing was stellar, the characters intriguing, the setting unsettling, the narration excellent--but I think because of the frequent and apparently important interjection of apparently preternatural occurences, the ending of the book seems abrupt and unsatisfying.

A beautiful, evocative Gothic tale

I was really enjoying this book. Like, a lot. Right up until that non-ending ending. There is no conflict resolution. There is no "solving" of the mystery of The Hundreds.

I was so bummed that now I'm never going to know so many of the things that I thought the action of the novel was building toward. I really liked how complex the plot of the novel became, and it was suspenseful and compelling. And then, it wasn't.

I totally loved all of the Gothic feelings this story invoked. The "haunted," dilapidated mansion, the besieged heroine, the just lonely feeling that the prose induced in me. I don't mind a meandering narrative as long as it has something going on and it makes me feel things, and this delivered in spades right up until that ending.

I wish books with sucky endings would just have really, really sucky beginnings, so that a) I wouldn't be as disappointed, or b) I could stop reading before I got involved. Alas, that was not the case, and I was so incredibly disappointed by the end of this novel that I could've thrown things.

Oh, well. Three stars for the good stuff. Minus 100 stars for that "ending."

Excellent Storry

This novel was beautifully written. The author keeps you guessing as to the cause of the disturbances. The dialogue and relationship between Dr. Faraday and Miss. Ayres is flawless. The movie was well produced and casted, but the screenplay was a disappointment.

Wonderful!

I have loved all of Sarah Waters books and this was no exception. Great story