The Little Stranger
Abundantly atmospheric and elegantly told, *The Little Stranger* is Sarah Waterss most thrilling and ambitious novel yet. After her award-winning trilogy of victorian novels, sarah waters turned to the 1940s and wrote the night watch, a tender and tragic novel set against the backdrop of wartime britain shortlisted for both the orange and the man booker, it went straight to number one in the bestseller chart in a dusty post-war summer in rural warwickshire, a doctor is called to a patient at hundreds hall home to the ayres family for over 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 sinister 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 prepare yourself from this wonderful writer who continues to astonish us, now comes a chilling ghost story.
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In the summer of 1947, country doctor Faraday is called to crumbling Hundreds Hall, the Warwickshire estate where his mother once worked as a maid. Mrs. Ayres, her grown daughter Caroline, and her war-injured son Roderick are the last of the family, and the house is starting to misbehave.
Largely yes. The Little Stranger (2009) is Sarah Waters's most explicitly gothic horror novel, separate from her Victorian and 1940s historical works like Fingersmith and The Paying Guests.
Yes. The Little Stranger sustains gothic dread through ambiguity. Most readers find it more unsettling than gory, in the tradition of Henry James's Turn of the Screw and Shirley Jackson's haunted house novels.
The Little Stranger was written by Sarah Waters, published in 2009 by Virago.
The Little Stranger is 512 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Little Stranger takes most readers 8 to 11 hours to finish.
The Little Stranger is a standalone novel by Sarah Waters, not part of a series.
The Little Stranger is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
