The paying guests
Waters, Sarah, 1966-2015
Books
Find it!
'There came the splash of water and the rub of heels as Mrs Barber stepped into the tub. After that there was a silence, broken only by the occasional echoey plink of drips from the tap. 'Frances had been picturing her lodgers in purely mercenary terms as something like two great waddling shillings. But this, she thought, was what it really meant to have paying guests: this odd, unintimate proximity, this rather peeled-back moment, where the only thing between herself and a naked Mrs Barber was a few feet of kitchen and a thin scullery door. An image sprang into her head: that round flesh, crimsoning in the heat.' 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. For 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. And as passions mount and frustration gathers, no one can foresee just how far-reaching, and how devastating, the disturbances will be.
Main title:
The paying guests / Sarah Waters.
Author:
Waters, Sarah, 1966-, author
Edition:
Paperback edition.
Imprint:
London : Virago, 2015.©2014
Collation:
599 pages ; 20 cm.
Notes:
Originally published: 2014.
ISBN:
9780349004600
Dewey class:
823.92
Language:
English
Subject:
BRN:
331838