Paying Guests (Waters) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Although Waters is definitely up to constructing a big, entertaining story, her strength seems to be in blueprinting social architecture in terms of its tiniest corners and angles, matters measurable by inches rather than feet—small moments we recognize but have never articulated, even to ourselves…. Perhaps Waters's most impressive accomplishment is the authentic feel she achieves, that the telling—whether in its serious, exciting, comic or sexy passages—has no modern tinge. Not just that no one heats up the cauliflower cheese in a microwave or sends a text message, but that the story appears not merely to be about the novel's time but to have been written by someone living in that time, thumping out the whole thing on a manual typewriter.
Carol Anshaw - New York Times Book Review


[A] tour de force of precisely observed period detail and hidden passions.
Wall Street Journal


You open The Paying Guests and immediately surrender to the smooth assuredness of Sarah Waters’s silken prose… You cannot choose but read. The book has you in thrall. You will follow Waters and her story anywhere… A novel that initially seems as if it might have been written by E.M. Forster darkens into something by Dostoevsky or Patricia Highsmith. It also becomes unputdownable … the reader is in for a seriously heart-pounding roller-coaster ride.
Washington Post


The new Sarah Waters novel, which finds the author at the height of her powers, weaves her characteristic threads of historical melodrama, lesbian romance, class tension, and sinister doings into a fabric of fictional delight that alternately has the reader flipping pages as quickly as possible, to find out what happens next, and hesitating to turn the page, for fear of what will happen next.
Boston Globe


[Waters] masterfully weaves true crime, domestic life and romantic passion into one of the best novels of suspense since Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca… [The Paying Guests is] diabolically clever… with one of the hottest sex scenes ever to be set in a scullery.
Los Angeles Times


It’s been a while since a book kept me up until 3:30 a.m., but The Paying Guests grabbed me and would not let me go…The wonderfully melodramatic plot, the brilliant characterization of protagonist Frances Wray, the vivid depiction of the zeitgeist in post-WWI London — each of these elements was equally responsible for the kidnapping of this unsuspecting reader, as masterminded by British novelist Sarah Waters, a three-time Booker Prize finalist.
Newsday


If you haven’t already embraced the novels of Sarah Waters, now is the moment. Don’t think twice. Collect all six and devour them with the same feverish abandon of the lovers who can be found between their covers…[The Paying Guests] is no romance novel or mere thriller, but a well-wrought, closely observed drama of a tumultuous period in British history… Herein lies the deliciousness of this book, and the others Waters has written: As much as Frances longs to give her heart to someone who will cherish it, we can never be sure, when she opens the final door, whether she will find the lady or the gallows.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch


Pitch perfect… powered by queer longing, defiant identity politics, and lusty, occasionally downright kinky sex.
Slate


(Starred review.) Readers of Waters’s previous novels know that she brings historical eras to life with consummate skill, rendering authentic details into layered portraits of particular times and places. Waters’s restrained, beautiful depiction of lesbian love furnishes the story with emotional depth, as does the suspense that develops during the tautly written murder investigation and ensuing trial.
Publishers Weekly


[A] rich historical setting in which you can feel the smallness of middle-class English life. But neither Frances nor Lilian is terribly sympathetic, and it's hard to root for them. But perhaps that is the point. Waters keeps you guessing until the very end. Verdict: For fans of complex historical crime fiction with a strong sense of dread. —Devon Thomas, Chelsea, MI
Library Journal


(Starred review.) An exquisitely tuned exploration of class in post-Edwardian Britain—with really hot sex.... As life-and-death questions are answered, new ones come up, and until the last page, the reader will have no idea what's going to happen. Waters keeps getting better, if that's even possible after the sheer perfection of her earlier novels.
Kirkus Reviews