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Loading... The Little Stranger: shortlisted for the Booker Prize (original 2009; edition 2010)by Sarah Waters (Autore)
Work InformationThe Little Stranger by Sarah Waters (2009)
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A big old-fashioned English countryside novel which I did not want to put down, this book moved along at a dignified but sprightly pace, a ghost story narrated by a man of science (the doctor). It recalled Wilkie Collins in its setting and the reasoned deductions on the narrator's part but moved much faster and the ending leaves me pondering ghostly things. Well-written and enjoyable. ( ) Dr. Faraday, a local GP in a Warwickshire town, is called out to tend to a sick housemaid at the local manor house, Hundreds Hall. There he meets the Ayres family, the last of a noble line, and sees their once-beautiful estate fallen to ruins through impoverishment and neglect. A relationship forms between Faraday and the Ayres family, and he becomes both doctor and guest to the widowed mother and her two surviving children, who are in their twenties. Terrible and inexplicable tragedies occur at Hundreds Hall. Injuries, death, and madness plague the family and their guests. Sarah Waters is a dab hand at invoking atmosphere, and much like Shirley Jackson's Hill House, the building itself becomes a place of tension, fear, and power. The book is creepy, not a book to be read when one is alone at night, and it is a well-narrated tale that genuinely captures the essence of its characters. I would have given the book more stars were I not dissatisfied with the ending, about which I will say nothing more. It's a good book for anyone who likes spine-tingling tales.
While at one turn, the novel looks to be a ghost story, the next it is a psychological drama of the calibre of du Maurier's Rebecca. But it is also a brilliantly observed story, verging on comedy, about Britain on the cusp of the modern age. In the end, though, however fresh the prose, confident the plotting and astute the social analysis, The Little Stranger has a slightly secondhand feel to it. Waters is clearly at the top of her game, with few to match her ability to bring the past to life in a fully imagined world. I look forward to the book in which she leaves behind past templates, with their limitations, and breaks away to make her own literary history. I guess the Waters fans I spoke to were right to be anxious. There is plenty of lovely writing here, and the plot wasn't so dissatisfying that it put me off entirely. But it made me wary. Should I be? Or is it her worst work? Or, indeed, am I missing something? Over to you. The Little Stranger, like all the best works of postmodernist fiction, acknowledges both that making up stories is a mistaken and hopeless way to try to understand the world, and at the same time that it’s the best – perhaps the only – way we have. The story ends in madness, suicide and a creepy darkness reminiscent of Daphne du Maurier's "Rebecca" -- mixed with jolts of anxiety and social upheaval reminiscent of today's news. Has the adaptationHas as a commentary on the textAwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
"The #1 book of 2009...Several sleepless nights are guaranteed."—Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly One postwar summer in his home of rural Warwickshire, Dr. Faraday, the son of a maid who has built a life of quiet respectability as a country physician, is called to a patient at lonely Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the Georgian house, once impressive 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 intimately entwined with his. No library descriptions found.
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.914Literature English English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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