Sarah Waters, famed for her historical novels with a lesbian lilt, probably needs no introduction. During her relatively short, five book career, Water’s has been nominated for (and won) a host of awards, and The Little Stranger saw her nominated for a third time for the Man Booker Prize. Her latest novel, set in a crumbling post-Second World War gentry estate, omits her usual lesbian subject matter and follows the story of an old upper class family as they struggle to keep their estate in a world that seems to have long forgotten them. The Ayres family plight becomes entwined with that of a country doctor – Faraday – who in his bid to help the family, becomes a friend, a lover and a possible perpetrator in this tale of ghosts, phantasms and spectres – the family’s ‘little stranger’ itself.

The Hundreds Hall dates back further than the novel’s scope, giving the house a story of its own in which it literally seems to come to life. The haunting at Hundreds commences with little black marks appearing on the walls, a fire started from nowhere, tapping in the walls and bells sounding of their own accord, which leads the novels’ tragic heroine Caroline to feel that it is something about the house that is doing the haunting and not something within it. Admittedly even for the sceptic Doctor the house holds some kind of spell over him; the dated glamour reminding him of his childhood and his mother’s time as a nursery maid within it. The haunting acts as a warning that the house will outlive its inhabitants as we are reminded by the death of Mrs. Ayres’ first daughter Susan – again this happened outside the time period of the novel but within the house. Indeed for each member of the household the haunting offers a different fright, for Roderick, the fear of losing the estate, for Mrs Ayres, the death of her daughter and for Caroline, perhaps the strongest of the lot, the death of her dog and companion ‘Gyp.’

The novel deals adeptly with issues of class, post-war neglect, madness and haunting, many of the themes apparent in Waters’ other novels. Another theme which seems to preoccupy Waters is that of imprisonment – in Affinity Selina’s time in the gaol, in Fingersmith the imprisonment of Maud in the Briar and in Tipping the Velvet Nan’s confinement after the loss of Kitty Butler. It seems that for Water’s, old houses, old stories are all caught up with tales of imprisonment, confinement and incarceration. The Ayres can no more escape their home than their own lives, doors literally stop opening, trapping them inside, doomed to their twinned fate. These old gentry’ houses seem as one and the same as the family that inhabits them. The house has a life of its own which seems to determine that of the people inside it – in the end it doesn’t matter whether it is the house or the people within that are causing the problem – they are one and the same.

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