Forbidden passion lurks behind the net curtains of the south London suburbs in Sarah Waters’s latest novel, The Paying Guests. It’s set in the 1920s – a period of surplus women testing their burgeoning freedoms, and a new class mobility. To make ends meet, the widowed Mrs Wray and her unmarried daughter, Frances, are forced to take in lodgers, or “paying guests” as Mrs Wray prefers to describe Leonard and Lilian Barber, the rather loud and brassy clerk and his wife who take up residence on the first floor of the Wrays’ Champion Hill home. Loosely based on Fryn Tennyson Jesse’s 1934 novel, A Pin to See the Peepshow (itself a fictionalised account of a real-life cause célèbre, the Thompson and Bywaters murder trial of 1922), what begins life as a sharply observed domestic set piece slowly morphs into a courtroom drama. Waters combines a gripping thriller with period detail evoked with a faultless fluidity.
The Paying Guests is published by Virago (£7.99). Click here to order it for £5.99
