The Little Stranger

by Sarah Waters

Sarah Waters sets her atmospheric ghost story in postwar England, where a country doctor becomes entangled with the declining Ayres family at their crumbling Warwickshire estate, Hundreds Hall. Strange events begin to plague the house — unexplained sounds, objects moving, a child's disturbing drawings — and Waters sustains a masterful ambiguity about whether the supernatural is real or a projection of psychological distress. The novel is as much about class, loss, and England's postwar dismantling of its own aristocracy as it is about haunting. It is elegant, deeply unsettling, and fiendishly difficult to put down.