The Paying Guests

Name: The Paying Guests
Rating: 3.8 (19038 reviews)

by Sarah Waters

Amazon

3.8(19,038)

In 1922, Frances Wray and her widowed mother take in Leonard and Lilian Barber as lodgers to keep their Camberwell house financially afloat. The arrangement disrupts the household’s class boundaries and emotional order, especially as Frances and Lilian become drawn into a secret relationship. The novel turns from domestic pressure and desire into crime, fear and moral compromise in interwar London.

The confined household makes money, privacy and social convention impossible to separate. Frances’s attraction to Lilian develops inside a post-war London where respectable families have lost income but still cling to older class assumptions. Once secrecy gives way to violence, the novel becomes an examination of how desire and guilt alter what each woman believes she owes the other.