The Little Stranger (Sarah Waters, 2009)
The following response to the book contains significant plot details. There’s nothing like doing an English literature degree for dampening your love of reading novels. And nothing like doing a PhD and the subsequent years of futile academic jobhunting to stamp it out altogether. (That’s how it was in my circumstances, anyway, and I commend anyone who refuses to let that happen.) Having said goodbye to that career path and clawed back my health, I’ve been slowly and with difficulty overcoming the guilt of not working every minute of every day and am reading the books that have for years been silently screaming for me to wipe off the dust and give them a good going through. One of those books is Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger (Virago, 2009), which I’m excited to have learned is being adapted as a feature film directed by Lenny Abrahamson – whose work I greatly admire – due out later in 2018. What a gripping, carefully-written tale it is. And what an underlying scathing exami