Queen Anne Books

I’ve often used an old cliché about Sarah Waters – that I’d read the phone book if she wrote it – because I loved The Night Watch so much. She has an amazing ability to draw me deeply inside her characters, to make me feel not just that I am reading about a group of people, but that I am one of them, that I’m participating in their lives. She has done it again in The Little Stranger and this time it’s a ghost story.

Just after World War II a middle-aged Dr. Faraday is called to the declining country estate of Hundreds Hall. Years ago, his mother was a nanny at Hundreds and, since then, it has always held his imagination. As his friendship with the family grows, he discovers that things are not quite right at Hundreds – perhaps it’s a secret history of mental illness, perhaps simply the stress of reduced circumstances, or perhaps something more sinister. ~Lillian