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The Little Stranger
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The Little Stranger (2009) (edit title/settings)

by Sarah Waters (Author) (edit contributors)

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Description edit see section history

A chilling and vividly rendered ghost story set in postwar Britain, by the bestselling and award-winning author of The Night Watch and Fingersmith.

With The Little Stranger, Waters revisits the fertile setting of Britain in the 1940s -- and gives us a sinister tale of a haunted house,... read more

Summary edit see section history

In a dusty post-war summer in rural Warwickshire, a doctor is called to a patient at Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the Georgian house, once grand and handsome, is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable... read more (warning: may contain spoilers)

In a dusty post-war summer in rural Warwickshire, a doctor is called to a patient at Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the Georgian house, once grand and handsome, is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable yard permanently fixed at twenty to nine. Its owners – mother, son and daughter – are struggling to keep pace with a changing society, as well as with conflicts of their own.

But are the Ayreses haunted by something more sinister 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.

Prepare yourself. From this wonderful writer who continues to astonish us, now comes a chilling ghost story.

Characters/People edit see section history

  • Dr Faraday: The narrator of the novel who tends to the Ayres and gets more involved
  • Caroline Ayres: The daughter of Mrs Ayres
  • Roderick Ayres: The son of Mrs Ayes. He has a war wound.
  • Mrs Ayres: Mother of Caroline and Roderick, and also of Susan, who died years ago.
  • Betty: The maid employed by the Ayres.
  • Mrs Bazeley: She comes in occasionally as housekeeper at hundreds Hall
  • David Graham: A Doctor, and colleague of Dr Faraday
  • Dr Seeley: A Doctor and colleague of Dr Faraday
  • Maurice Babb: Builder of new houses on the grounds of Hundreds Hall
  • Susan Ayres: First daughter of Mrs Ayres. Susan died when very young.
  • Anne Graham: Wife of Dr Graham
Show all 11 characters
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Quotes edit see section history

  • “She said families like ours, they had a—a responsibility, they had to set an example. She said, if we couldn't do that, if we couldn't be better and braver than ordinary people, then what was the point of us?”
    Caroline Ayres
  • “"Hundereds is lovely. But it's a sort of lovely monster! It needs to be fed all the time, with money and hard work."”
    Caroline Ayres
  • Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
  • The subliminal mind has many dark, unhappy corners, after all. Imagine something loosening itself from one of those corners. Let’s call it a—a germ. And let’s say conditions prove right for that germ to develop—to grow, like a child in the womb. What would this little stranger grow into? A sort of shadow-self, perhaps: a Caliban, a Mr Hyde. A creature motivated by all the nasty impulses and hungers the conscious mind had hoped to keep hidden away: things like envy, and malice, and frustration
    Highlighted by 23 Kindle customers
  • ‘Well, the sexual impulse is the darkest of all, and has to emerge somewhere. It’s like an electrical current; it has a tendency, you know, to find its own conductors. But if it goes untapped—well, then it’s a rather dangerous energy.’
    Highlighted by 13 Kindle customers
  • If Hundreds Hall is haunted, however, its ghost doesn’t show itself to me. For I’ll turn, and am disappointed—realising that what I am looking at is only a cracked window-pane, and that the face gazing distortedly from it, baffled and longing, is my own.
    Highlighted by 9 Kindle customers
  • Could there be something loose in that house, some sort of ravenous frustrated energy, with Caroline at its heart?
    Highlighted by 8 Kindle customers
  • She went into the house as if stepping through a rip in the night and instantly sealing it up behind her.
    Highlighted by 7 Kindle customers
  • You don’t actually think I should abandon her to her delusions, purely for the sake of keeping intact some sort of . . . class pride?’
    Highlighted by 7 Kindle customers
  • Caroline looked at her for a moment, struck by the lines of age and sadness in her face, and suddenly seeing her—as, when we are young, we are now and then shocked to see our parents—as an individual, a person of impulses and experiences of which she herself knew nothing, and with a past, with a sorrow in it, which she could not penetrate.
    Highlighted by 6 Kindle customers
  • I’ve never attempted to remind Seeley of his other, odder theory: that Hundreds was consumed by some dark germ, some ravenous shadow-creature, some ‘little stranger’, spawned from the troubled unconscious of someone connected with the house itself.
    Highlighted by 5 Kindle customers
  • anodyne response, and we talked the matter over for a time; but the conversation soon returned to the great parties and balls that the county had hosted in the past, and I had less to contribute. ‘That must have been nineteen twenty-eight or ’twenty-nine,’ I heard Miss Dabney say, of some particularly glittering event; and I was just wryly picturing my life in those years, as a medical student in Birmingham, dead on
    Highlighted by 4 Kindle customers
  • mendacious man. I’ve seen too many of the complications, in the lives of my patients, to which lies lead. But in this instance I thought it best to try and put a definite end to any speculation regarding Caroline and me; I thought this for Caroline’s sake as much as my own. I rather hoped to run into Seeley. I planned to ask him, baldly, to do all he could to quash those rumours he’d mentioned, which suggested that I was romantically interested in one or
    Highlighted by 3 Kindle customers
Show all 12 quotes from this book

First Sentence edit see section history

I first saw Hundred's Hall when I was ten years old.

Table of Contents edit see section history

Untitled Chapters 1-15

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Sarah Waters (Author)

Other Contributors:

  1. Andrea Ho (Designer) - jacket designer
  2. Michael Trevillion (Photographer) - jacket photographs of the house and road.

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: Virago
Country: Great Britain
Publication Date: April 30, 2009
ISBN: 978184408-601-6
Page Count: 499

Classification edit see section history

  • Library of Congress: PR6073.A828 L58
  • Dewey: 823.914

Notes for Parents edit see section history

Reading Level: Young Adults

A mature 15/16 year old might like this book, but it's probably for people aged 17 or 18+

Links to Supplemental Material edit see section history

More Books Like This edit see section history

   
  • Fingersmith
  • Affinity
  • The Night Watch
  • Tipping the Velvet

Books That Influenced This Book edit see section history

   
  • Rebecca
  • The Fall of the House of Usher

Books Cited by This Book edit see section history

   
  • Der Struwwelpeter

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