On an unusually hot summer afternoon in 1947, Dr Faraday is called urgently to Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for more than two centuries, the Georgian house, once grand and handsome, is now in decline – its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds. But are the Ayres haunted by something more ominous than a dying way of life? Little does Dr Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become entwined with his.

Dr. Faraday

Dr. Faraday, the novel’s narrator, is a country doctor from a working-class background. As a child, he was captivated by Hundreds Hall, a grand estate that has since fallen into decline. This fascination with the house and its inhabitants, the Ayres family, persists into his adulthood, eventually evolving into an obsession.

Caroline Ayres

Caroline is the daughter of the Ayres family. She remains unmarried, and shoulders the burden of caring for her family’s crumbling estate. As Hundreds Hall decays around her, along with her relatives, Caroline begins to look for a way out – and falls into a relationship with Faraday.

Mrs. Ayres

Mrs. Ayres is the head of the Ayres family. She is deeply concerned with their social standing and external perceptions, and is desperately clinging to the remnants of the family’s old way of life, the glamour of which is visibly fading around her.

Roderick Ayres

Roderick, son of Mrs. Ayres, is a war veteran who is scarred both physically and mentally. He walks with a limp due to an injury he sustained during his time in service. Roderick is convinced that a presence haunts Hundreds Hall, and his behaviour grows increasingly erratic as he seems to be unravelling under the house’s strange influence.

Betty

Betty, a young maid employed by the Ayres family, is quick-witted yet highly superstitious. She is convinced that Hundreds Hall is haunted, and her persistent claims of eerie happenings in the house add to the mounting tension among the Ayres family.

Sarah Waters has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times – in 2002, 2006 and 2009. Her novels have won the Betty Trask Award and the Somerset Maugham Award, and have also been shortlisted for the Orange Prize.

Her novels Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, Fingersmith and The Night Watch have all been adapted for television. She has been named Author of the Year four times: by the British Book Awards, the Booksellers’ Association, Waterstone’s Booksellers and the Stonewall Awards. She lives in London, and was awarded an OBE for services to literature in 2019.

Ron Charles, The Washington Post

‘Sarah Waters ain’t afraid of no ghost. Her new novel, a deliciously creepy tale called The Little Stranger, is haunted by the spirits of Henry James and Edgar Allan Poe […] The supernatural creaks and groans that reverberate through this tale are accompanied by malignant strains of class envy and sexual repression that infect every perfectly reasonable explanation we hear.’

Scarlett Thomas, The New York Times Sunday Book Review

‘Sarah Waters is an excellent, evocative writer, and this is an incredibly gripping and readable novel. But to some extent her skill works against her. The Ayreses are such lovingly depicted and realistic characters that it becomes hard to accept their gothic fates […] If death is a harsh sentence for all but the flattest fictional characters, then one is left with the uncomfortable sense that the Ayreses have been needlessly murdered by progress and social change, which doesn’t feel quite right either.’

Maud Newton, NPR

‘Class anxiety is the animating force behind Waters’ fifth book, The Little Stranger, a suspenseful and psychologically layered haunted-house story set in the aftermath of World War II, when the fading gentry collided with the emerging professional class that would once have been the help […] Waters, a master at stoking anticipation, withholds the truth about her ghost until the final pages. By then we already strongly suspect its identity, but the confirmation is subtle, surprising, and deeply, deeply chilling.’

Laura Miller, Salon

‘Sarah Waters’ masterly, enthralling new novel, The Little Stranger, hews to the essential aspects of the traditional ghost story: the big spooky country house with a tragic past, the peculiar noises and eerie events that slowly intensify into a terrifying assault, the blurring line between internal turmoil and external phenomena, the skeptical scientific observer nudged ever closer to belief. Yet Waters has boldly reassigned all these gothic motifs from their usual Freudian duties to another detail entirely: The Little Stranger is about class, and the unavoidable yet lamentable price paid when venerable social hierarchies begin to erode.’

Kirkus

‘Waters’ scrupulously engineered plot builds efficiently to a truly scary highpoint halfway through her long narrative. But tensions relax perilously, as the doctor’s repeated emergency visits to Hundreds Hall become almost risibly indistinguishable, and even crucial dramatic moments are muffled by fervent conversations among the four major characters. Furthermore, too many crucial pieces of information are relayed secondhand, as Faraday summarizes accounts of other people’s experiences. Still, Waters has extended her range agreeably, working in traditions established by Edgar Allan Poe, Sheridan le Fanu and Wilkie Collins, expertly teasing us with suggestive allusions to the classics of supernatural fiction.’

‘The Little Stranger was my first novel with a full-blown supernatural element, but two of my earlier books – Affinity and Fingersmith – have their Gothic elements, so I do think of myself as quite a Gothic writer, actually. Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House were both influences on The Little Stranger – as were their brilliant film adaptations, Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961) and Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963).’

Read the full interview here. 

Faraday, the novel’s narrator, could be perceived as unreliable. Do you think he is consciously misleading the reader, or are there things he refuses to or is unable to see? How might his unreliability influence your understanding of the story’s events?

The house in The Little Stranger takes on a life of its own, almost becoming a character in its own right on occasions, such as when Caroline Ayres is described as stepping ‘into the house as if stepping into a rip in the night’. How does the house affect the lives of the Ayres family? Do you think it really is haunted, or could it be a symbol for something else?

How does Faraday’s working-class background fuel his growing obsession with Hundreds Hall? In what ways does his desire to transcend his class influence him throughout the novel?

‘What a punishing business it is, simply being alive’, Faraday remarks, in reference to Roderick. (Page 144). How did you interpret Faraday’s comment? Is he speaking solely of his observations of Roderick, or is he revealing something about his personal beliefs and broader struggles?

As the story progresses, Hundreds Hall decays. How does the deterioration of the house mirror the decline of the Ayres family and reflect the broader social changes that took place after the Second World War?

The relationships between the Ayres family members evolve throughout The Little Stranger, particularly that of Caroline and Mrs Ayres. Discuss their character arcs, and how the changing family dynamics contribute to the story’s tension and eventual resolutions.

The Little Stranger maintains a sense of ambiguity, with unsettling occurrences often paired with more rational explanations. Discuss the final events of the novel, along with your interpretations of the possible explanations.

In an interview with Penguin Random House, Waters said, ‘technically, [The Little Stranger] may not really be a ghost story at all. There’s definitely some kind of haunting going on; the interesting question for me was: what’s at the root of it?’. Discuss Waters’ comment here. Do you think the novel is a ghost story, or is the haunting a metaphor for something else?

Sarah Waters has cited classic ghost stories such as The Turn of the Screw and The Haunting of Hill House as influences on The Little Stranger. In what ways do you see the influence of those and other classic works in The Little Stranger?

In a review for the Washington Post, Ron Charles writes ‘What saves The Little Stranger from sinking into a fetid swamp of cliche is the author’s restraint, her ability, like [Henry] James’s, to excite our imagination through subtle suggestion alone’. Where in the novel did you notice Waters using such restraint, and how might this be carefully designed to impact the reading experience?

The Guardian: Guardian book club: The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

The Guardian: Hay festival: Sarah Waters on The Little Stranger

The New York Times: Book Review | ‘The Little Stranger,’ by Sarah Waters

The Booker Prizes: Short Film: ‘The Little Stranger’ by Sarah Waters

New Writing North: An Evening with Sarah Waters, chaired by Caroline Beck

Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

The Night Watch by Sarah Waters

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James