Sarah Waters - The Little Stranger

Mmm, I never read The Night Watch, but somewhere along the line, Waters has gotten really good. Essentially a post-war haunted house story, redolent with psychological ambiguity and unease, and delicately steeped in post-Victorian and Freudian notions of the unconscious and the uncanny, The Little Stranger is full of strikingly lucid, elegantly clear prose and note-perfect descriptions, wedded to a building sense of eeriness and a story that grabs from the beginning and doesn't let go. It draws heavily on older, classic examples of the type - The Turn of the Screw isn't an unreasonable comparison - but distinguishes itself both through its craft and, relatedly, by the manner in which it develops into a subtle parable about class, as seen through the lens of the relationship between Faraday and the Ayreses. A really terrific novel, and one which has left me with no doubt that Waters deserves the acclaim she's increasingly been receiving.