The Paying Guests Audiobook By Sarah Waters cover art

The Paying Guests

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The Paying Guests

By: Sarah Waters
Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
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About this listen

From the best-selling author of The Little Stranger, an enthralling novel 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' 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, and here she has delivered again. A love story, a tension-filled crime story, and a beautifully atmospheric portrait of a fascinating time and place, The Paying Guests is Sarah Waters' finest achievement yet.

©2014 Sarah Waters (P)2014 Penguin Audio
Fiction Genre Fiction Historical Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction

Critic reviews

"Awesome, full-bodied novel. 'It's like she's saying, hey dudes, this is how you do it'." (Stephen King, via Twitter)

“Superb, bewitching.... Forget about Fifty Shades of Grey; this novel is one of the most sensual you will ever read, and all without sacrificing either good taste or a 'G' rating.... [The Paying Guests] is a magnificent creation, a book that doubles as a time machine, flinging us back not only to postwar London, but also to our own lost love affairs, the kind that left us breathless.” (NPR)

“A beautifully observed tale of murder, suspense, crumbling class distinctions and steamy lesbian love in post-Edwardian London. Like something Virginia Woolf might have written if she’d been racier.” (People)