Affinity by Sarah Waters

Affinity by Sarah Waters

Gothic tale, psychological study, puzzle narrative.This is gripping, astute fiction that feeds the mind and senses.--The Seattle Times

An upper-class woman recovering from a suicide attempt, Margaret Prior has begun visiting the women's ward of Millbank prison, Victorian London's grimmest jail, as part of her rehabilitative charity work. Amongst Millbank's murderers and common thieves, Margaret finds herself increasingly fascinated by on apparently innocent inmate, the enigmatic spiritualist Selina Dawes. Selina was imprisoned after a s ance she was conducting went horribly awry, leaving an elderly matron dead and a young woman deeply disturbed. Although initially skeptical of Selina's gifts, Margaret is soon drawn into a twilight world of ghosts and shadows, unruly spirits and unseemly passions, until she is at last driven to concoct a desperate plot to secure Selina's freedom, and her own.

As in her noteworthy deput, Tipping the Velvet, Sarah Waters brilliantly evokes the sights and smells of a moody and beguiling nineteenth-century London, and proves herself yet again a storyteller, in the words of the New York Times Book Review, of startling power.

Waters, Sarah: - Sarah Waters has written six novels: Tipping the Velvet (1998, Betty Trask Award); Affinity (1999, Somerset Maugham Award, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award); Fingersmith (2002, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize, and winner of the South Bank Show Award for Literature and the CWA Historical Dagger); The Night Watch (2006, shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Man Booker Prize); The Little Stranger (2009, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the South Bank Show Literature Award) and The Paying Guests (2014, shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction). She was included in Granta's prestigious list of 'Best of Young British Novelists 2003', and in the same year was voted Author of the Year at the British Book Awards and the BA Conference, and won the Waterstones Author of the Year Award. In April 2015 she joined the Council of the Society of Authors.