The Little Stranger
By Sarah Waters
The setting is rural Warwickshire, just after the Second World War. Our narrator, Dr Faraday, more hopelessly dim than actually unreliable, is a local GP and a bachelor aged around 40.
When he was a 10 year-old boy, he visited the local big house, Hundreds Hall. It awed and enchanted him and, wanting to possess a piece of it, he cut off an acorn from the decorative plasterwork with his pen-knife and took it home in his pocket.
He next sees the house 30 years later, when on locum he is called in to attend to a 14-year-old maidservant who’s complaining of tummy trouble but is actually just out of sorts because she finds the hall creepy. Inevitable, strange things begin happening in the house.
Actually, the central character is not any of the people but the house itself, Hundreds Hall. For this is ultimately a gamey old haunted house novel.
There is no subplot, quite a small cast, a straightforward narrative structure, and as Sarah Water herself admits, “It’s all pretty much in the house and it’s like one thing after another.” Only one thing, don’t read this book in the house on your own at night.
