Uploaded November 2015 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Lou Muddle interviews Sarah Waters about her most recent novel, The Paying Guests which was shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2015.
‘I feel it’s easily the finest novel I’ve read this year’ Sunday Times
The novel is both a psychological thriller and the story of a doomed love affair, set in the transitional social world of 1920s London. A widow, living with a her spinster daughter in a genteel Camberwell villa, now empty of brothers, husbands and servants, takes on lodgers of the “clerk class”. The arrival of this modern young couple shakes up the household in unexpected ways. As with her previous novels, The Little Stranger and the Night Watch, Waters is exploring a newly fragmented world in which old barriers of class and gender are falling away.
Waters’ previous novels include the award-winning Tipping the Velvet, Fingersmith, Night Watch and Affinity all of which were adapted for television dramas.
Lou Muddle interviews Sarah Waters about her most recent novel, The Paying Guests which was shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2015.
‘I feel it’s easily the finest novel I’ve read this year’ Sunday Times
The novel is both a psychological thriller and the story of a doomed love affair, set in the transitional social world of 1920s London. A widow, living with a her spinster daughter in a genteel Camberwell villa, now empty of brothers, husbands and servants, takes on lodgers of the “clerk class”. The arrival of this modern young couple shakes up the household in unexpected ways. As with her previous novels, The Little Stranger and the Night Watch, Waters is exploring a newly fragmented world in which old barriers of class and gender are falling away.
Waters’ previous novels include the award-winning Tipping the Velvet, Fingersmith, Night Watch and Affinity all of which were adapted for television dramas.
