books review

Sarah Waters

Edinburgh International Book Festival/ Meet The Author

It may be what made her famous, but there's more to Sarah Waters than period dramas spiced-up with titillating lesbian sex scenes. She keeps things historical with her latest book, 'The Little Stranger', set in the post-war period, an intricately plotted supernatural thriller. Like her earlier work, this novel revisits the past in order to reclaim submerged histories, although here it is class politics, rather than alternative sexualities, that surface. Water's lively conversation demonstrates a voracious interest in the social dynamics of previous eras, as well as their literary representations: this book, for example, situates itself within a Gothic tradition of gloomy country houses and things that go bump in the night. Waters' fiction is both gripping and intellectual.

RBS Main Theatre, 25 Aug, 11.30am

published: Sep-2009

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