Friday, October 29, 2010

The Literary Life: The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters



What frightens you? What makes your heart race? Which books have kept you up at night?

In this episode of The Literary Life, we'll investigate fright: that disturbing feeling that can spring from the most unlikely of places—even the pages of books.

Sarah Waters joins us to discuss her newest book, The Little Stranger, a gothic novel and finalist for the Man Booker Prize that critics have compared to Henry James and Edgar Allen Poe. Koren Zailckas, author of Smashed and Fury joins us to rant about what not to do when reading your own audiobook in our latest installation of The Writer's Rant. Rich Hasselberger explains why designing a book jacket for a thriller is different than for a paranormal romance. We'll also hear from Kristin Hersh, founder of the band Throwing Muses, whose memoir, Rat Girl, tells the harrowing story of being a young indie rock musician at the birth of the alternative music movement in the 1980s.



Fright - The Literary Life - Penguin Group (USA)

A chilling and vividly rendered ghost story set in postwar Britain, by the bestselling and award-winning author of The Night Watch and Fingersmith.Sarah Waters’s trilogy of Victorian novels Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, and Fingersmith earned her legions of fans around the world, a number of awards, and a reputation as one of today’s most gifted historical novelists. With her most recent book, The Night Watch, Waters turned to the 1940s and delivered a tender and intricate novel of relationships that brought her the greatest success she has achieved so far. With The Little Stranger, Waters revisits the fertile setting of Britain in the 1940s—and gives us a sinister tale of a haunted house, brimming with the rich atmosphere and psychological complexity that have become hallmarks of Waters’s work.The Little Stranger follows the strange adventures of Dr. Faraday, the son of a maid who has built a life of quiet respectability as a country doctor. One dusty postwar summer in his home of rural Warwickshire, he is called to a patient at Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for more than 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 ominous 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.Abundantly atmospheric and elegantly told, The Little Stranger is Sarah Waters’s most thrilling and ambitious novel yet.
From Barnes & Noble

Penguin Group (USA)
May 4, 2010
528 pages
$16.00 US

Visit Sarah's website





Disclosure:  I received a copy of this book for free.  All opinions expressed are 100% mine.  If you make a purchase using my Amazon or Barnes and Noble link, I will receive a small portion of the purchase price.



Bookmark and Share

No comments:

Post a Comment