But the story is also a metaphor of the old England disappearing with the ravages of World War II and of the birth of a social order personified by new money and the NHS.

The influence of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher inevitably comes to mind while reading The Little Stranger. The Ayerses may be ready to leave the place behind, but will it let them go? Nonetheless, as the plot moves forward, it becomes clear that something is afoot, and that the house is another character in the story, perhaps more powerful and dominant than the humans inhabiting it. There is a suggestion that an evil force may have the manor in its grip, although the physician’s rational mind struggles to accept that possibility. They include a random attack by the house pet on a young child, and an unexplained fire. Faraday befriends the family and he witnesses strange occurrences that take place at Hundreds Hall. Ayers, and her two adult children, are affected by more than economic hardship. The maid’s illness may not be what it seems, and it soon becomes clear that the matriarch of the family, Mrs. Faraday, is called one day to attend to a sick housemaid at Hundreds Hall, once the seat of a prosperous landowning family, now falling into disrepair. Set in a crumbling, gloomy manor of Hundreds Hall in the English countryside in the immediate postwar years, it has a psychologically tense air that will appeal to many gothic mystery fans. Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger combines historical fiction with a touch of supernatural.

The little stranger book review