Your rating:
One postwar summer in his home of rural Warwickshire, Dr. Faraday, the son of a maid who has built a life of quiet respectability as a country physician, is called to a patient at lonely Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the Georgian house, once impressive 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. Its owners—mother, son, and daughter—are struggling to keep pace with a changing society, as well as with conflicts of their own. But are the Ayreses haunted by something more sinister than a dying way of life? Little does Dr. Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become intimately entwined with his.
No posts yet
Kick off the convo with a theory, question, musing, or update
Your rating:
0 0The Little Stranger is a sloooooow-starting book. So slow that I nearly DNFed it. I'm quite glad I stuck with it, because once it finally gets going, it's an eerie, unsettling, and richly constructed work. It just takes a while to build up the foundation for that.
It usually sounds like a disguised insult to say a book is "meticulously researched," but The Little Stranger is not only just that, it succeeds at using the research to craft an authentic-feeling narrative, rather than showing off the research for research's sake, the way many pieces of historical fiction do. Waters excels not only in the weaving in of details like what people in post-WWII England of various social groups would do, eat, wear, and live like, but in the development of an underlying uncertainty about class and tradition and progress that feels very of its time, a theme of the story that makes the reader occasionally forget she is reading a book written in the 2000s, rather than in the post-war years of its setting.
It's a crumbling, uneasy, haunting edifice of a book, just like the house at its heart, and one well worth reading. Simon Vance's audiobook rendering is particularly skillful and well-suited for the story.
0
© 2024 Pagebound