Roderick has not long returned from the Second World War and still bears physical and psychological damage. The landed gentry, the Ayres, are now much reduced, consisting of a widow and her two grown children, Roderick and Caroline. He is familiar with the house from a childhood visit to a fete held there. In Waters's fifth novel, The Little Stranger, Dr Faraday, a doctor in a small Warwickshire town, is called to Hundreds Hall, the manor house, to tend to a sick maid. To a list that includes Dickens, Wilkie Collins and gothic Victorian novels (Fingersmith, Affinity), and sober war-time dramas (The Night Watch), we can now add Daphne du Maurier and country house ghost stories. S arah Waters has made a name for herself not only by setting her novels in the past, but by following in the footsteps of other writers and reworking established genres.
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