The Great War has ended, social mores are uneasily shifting, the class systems are in upheaval, and for Frances and her mother, life has been utterly changed: their money and their men are gone, their family house on Champion Hill is in the process of falling apart in order to pay their mounting bills, they take in lodgers (called, in this genteel society, “paying guests”). It’s 1922, and London is on the brink of major change. Waters’ sixth and newest novel, The Paying Guests, tells the story of Frances, an unmarried woman in her late 20s living with her mother in south London. To call her work smart and sexy and entrancing would only begin to sum it up. Three of her novels have been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and several of them have been New York Times’ bestsellers. Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith are lesbian classics, and her gothic ghost story, The Little Stranger, was short-listed for the Orange Prize and named one of 2009’s best books by. I’ve been devouring Sarah Waters’ novels ever since. You, she said, her eyes bright, are going to love this book. Fourteen years ago, just before I started questioning my sexuality, I was having lunch with my best friend in New York City when she fished a battered copy of Tipping the Velvet out of her enormous purse and handed it to me. Earlier this year, when Lambda crowd-sourced #abooksavedmylife, one of the first books I thought of was Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet.
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