The Little Stranger

Sarah Waters

This is a gleefully spooky (and literary) mashup of a country-house story and a postwar social novel with a maybe-haunting blended into the mix. It’s all told by a rather dry, rational village doctor who absolutely does not believe in ghosts — until his confidence is rattled too many times to ignore.

The story takes place in Warwickshire, about halfway between London and Manchester, in the late 1940s. The grand old manor, Hundreds Hall, is crumbling. Literally. Its steps are cracked with weeds. The gates don’t quite open. Some rooms have been closed up, heirlooms quietly sold off. Inside, a widowed mother and her two adult children keep up appearances as best they can. But it’s not going well. The decades press in. Like the house, the class system is tottering but still there.

And in the middle of this is a little stranger. Maybe.

Waters writes all of this with a delightful combination of historical accuracy and Gothic unease. Our narrator, Dr. Faraday, first crossed the threshold of the manor as a dazzled child. Decades later, he returns on a routine house call. Now he finds decay where there had been sparkle. He parks his car, takes in the shabbiness, pulls the bell, and hears its thin, far-off ring — and that sets the tone for the rest of the book: everything familiar, just slightly off.

From this quiet wrongness, Waters builds a symphony of anxiety. Are the small disturbances the work of grief, money trouble, or nerves? Or is Hundreds Hall itself hungry? As a reader, the momentum to be whisked into the full crash-bang-run of a ghost story is there, yet the novel bends over and again toward the rational. That tension is like an engine, turning the pages of their own accord.

Although this is unequivocally a ghost story, it also feels psychologically true. Every reaction is the only thing that character would have done in that moment. The maid’s nerves, the widow’s composure, the daughter’s skepticism, and the doctor’s need to rationalize all map cleanly to how they protect themselves daily.

There are no ‘horror movie choices’ in this book. The author provides explanations that seem perfectly ordinary: the wiring is old, the vermin are moving about, and everybody is under too much stress. Weird noises lead to household bickering, but sometimes, the maybe-supernatural happenings also lead to a moment of unexpected delight. As a result of this psychological truth-telling, the house becomes a mirror for each of the characters.

The period detail in this book is impressive. You’ll smell the soap and coal, see the bells-and-wires callboard in the servants’ corridor, hear the creak of the wooden stairs, feel how dark a house like that would be in winter. Waters has discussed how deeply she delved into diaries, films, and ephemera to capture the time, down to the way people swore in private. It’s all sewn so well into the world of the novel that you’ll forget you’re reading historical fiction. Because it isn’t a dreamt past, it’s immersion.

This is a curl-up-and-lean-forward book. It invites you to be a skeptic and a believer at the same time. Read it for the atmosphere; stick around for how Waters uses a squeaking floorboard to explore class, desire, and the stories we tell ourselves to navigate a changing world.

And if you’re reading at night, maybe leave a light on.

I first saw Hundreds Hall when I was ten years old. It was the summer after the war, and the Ayreses still had most of their money then, were still big people in the district. The event was an Empire Day fête: I stood with a line of other village children making a Boy Scout salute while Mrs Ayres and the Colonel went past us, handing out commemorative medals; afterwards we sat to tea with our parents at long tables on what I suppose was the south lawn. Mrs Ayres would have been twenty-four or -five, her husband a few years older; their little girl, Susan, would have been about six. They must have made a very handsome family, but my memory of them is vague. I recall most vividly the house itself, which struck me as an absolute mansion. I remember its lovely ageing details: the worn red brick, the cockled window glass, the weathered sandstone edgings. They made it look blurred and slightly uncertain—like an ice, I thought, just beginning to melt in the sun. — Sarah Waters

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