Sarah Waters

Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award winner and London novelist Sarah Waters presents The Little Stranger, an eerie and thrilling tale set in post-World War II rural Britain. When Dr. Faraday, a Warwickshire physician, pays a visit to the Ayres family at their Hundreds Hall estate, he unknowingly enters a wickedly haunted house. His life soon becomes entwined with a family plagued by a terrifying past.

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.

"The lives of two young women collide in [a] ... thriller that alternates between the twisting back alleyways of Dickensian London and the cloistered gloom of a Gothic mansion. Raised in a den of petty thieves, or 'fingersmiths, ' plucky orphan Sue Trinder agrees to help a con man known as Gentleman defraud and betray wealthy heiress Maud Lilly. But Sue's plans are turned upside down when she falls in love with Maud. Then the women are separated --...