I bought this book having read "Affinity" - my favourite Waters book. It took a while for me to get into the book, but once I did - I was completely hooked. I think it very brave of Waters to explore psychological/mental health of the Ayres family; especially in a 1940s setting - when mental illn...
I was unfamiliar with Sarah Waters. . .and now I'm puzzled. This book worked well for me for the first third, or perhaps the first half. . .then I thought maybe I had mistakenly gotten into a Lifetime movie script and it was all downhill from there. I liked Waters writing about post-WWI England,...
In any short story collection, but particularly one with stories by multiple authors, it is impossible that all the stories should be equally pleasing. The first two stories I found exceptionally good, but the rest varied in quality and suitability to my personal taste. They are all quite short...
People called me Sue. I know the year I was born in, but for many years I did not know the date, and took my birthday at Christmas. I believe I am an orphan. My mother I know is dead. But I never saw her, she was nothing to me. I was Mrs Sucksby's child, if I was anyone's; and for father I had Mr...
They come as flowers, or as scents; sometimes they come only as a subtle alteration to the details of my room—I return to it and find an ornament taken up and set down crooked, the door to my closet ajar and my dresses with marks of fingers on the velvet and the silk, a cushion with a dent in it,...
Punctually, they came-so punctually, she really could tell the time by them: the woman with the crooked back, on Mondays at ten; the wounded soldier, on Thursdays at eleven. On Tuesdays at one an elderly man came, with a fey-looking boy to help him: Kay enjoyed watching for them. She liked to see...
When I first read it I As for Alice: after that one brief, bitter epistle, she never did not now whether to weep or throw the paper away from wrote to me at all. me in temper. In the end I burned the thing, and only hope you will have sense enough to burn this one, likewise. Chapter 6 'You ask me...
And to be honest, I was grateful for the delay. It gave me a chance, I thought, to sort through my feelings: to recover from my embarrassment at the blunders of the night; to tell myself that, after all, nothing much had passed between us; to put the whole thing down to the drink, and the darknes...
Darcy MARIANNE AND ELLIE Beth Cordingly Ellie sat, book in hand, trousers around her ankles, momentarily winded by the familiar words: A lover’s eyes will gaze an eagle blind;A lover’s ears will hear the lowest sound, They came like bad news in an unexpected phone call, disarming her. Flicking to...