The Paying Guests

I had the pleasure of hearing Sarah Waters speak at the Derby Book Festival in 2015, bought a signed copy of her latest novel, and have been recommending it ever since. The Paying Guests is set in the wake of World War I, and the historical context is beautifully rendered. Frances Wray and her mother have been living a quiet and orderly life on a street where the houses have ‘a Sunday blankness to them… every day of the week.’ It’s a life stuck in time, in a house whose ‘heart stopped… years ago.’ Then the Wrays’ new lodgers arrive,… show more.

Just the most luscious plunge into the domesticity of the post-WWI period. I do quite a bit of research into the 1930s when I write Dandy Gilver, but Sarah Waters is something else again. Frances is trying to run a house for herself and her mother (plus the new lodgers of the title) and you can smell the Brasso and taste the bottled coffee as you read. The book is action-packed too – a real page-turner – but it’s Frances’ daily grind that will have you re-reading even once you know the ending.

In the struggling post-WWI British economy, to make ends meet Frances Wray and her mother are forced to rent rooms to a married couple, Lillian and Leonard Barber. Frances and Lillian fall in love, and when Leonard finds out, the covert love affair turns ugly — and bloody. Waters’ ear for period dialog and attention to detail evokes 1922 London beautifully, making us feel how confining it was to be a woman and a lesbian during this era. The novel takes a violent turn when the oppressive British legal system threatens not only to separate Frances and Lillian, but also… show more.