The Night Watch
“It is the highest point of a career that has so far been nothing but highs.”
—The Mail on Sunday
“A writer whose talent for charting social and political intricacies is matched by her delicate feel for the nuances of erotic attachment…Waters’s strength as a writer lies in her ability to delineate, with authority and compassion, the emotional bonds that link and sometimes entrap all these characters. Waters reveals an instinctive empathy that makes reading The Night Watch a captivating—if occasionally turbulent—experience…. An estimable and moving book.”
—The New York Times
“Waters’s storytelling instincts are on the mark…. Elizabeth Bowen once said that ‘the plot of a literary novel is what you have left over after you’ve gotten rid of everything that doesn’t belong.’ The unusual shape and chronology of The Night Watch illustrate this perfectly. The book takes the form it does because that’s the way its powerful, poignant content demanded to go.”
—The Seattle Times
“The Night Watch is a book that takes fleeting, seemingly unimportant moments and uses them to illuminate the meaning of an entire human existence.”
—Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
“Waters’s historical research and keen eye for detail are present on virtually every page.”
—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Immediately recognizable as a Sarah Waters novel: perfectly pitched, and so involving you feel as if you’re mainlining it rather than merely reading.”
—Time Out
“The Night Watch burns with a slow but scorching intensity, like the blasts that constantly put its circle of four Londoners at risk. It is Sarah Waters’s triumph.”
—Independent on Sunday
“Full of subtle twists…will delight Waters’s many existing fans, while winning her a whole raft of new ones.”
—The Express
“A fine accomplishment. [Waters] weaves the life stories of these characters so skillfully that even amazing coincidences seem inevitable.”
—Rocky Mountain News
“The backward structure of The Night Watch is its most intriguing characteristic…. It creates its own sort of reverse suspense.”
—Houston Chronicle
“Waters applies her talent for literary suspense to World War II–era London in her latest historical. She populates the novel with ordinary people overlooked by history books and sets their individual passions against the chaotic background of extraordinary times. [A] sharply drawn page-turner.”
—Publishers Weekly
“[A] moody, atmospheric novel…vivid and compelling.”
—Library Journal
“Readers will be tempted to return to the beginning of Waters’s elegant novel after turning the final page to fully appreciate the depth of the characters and their connection to each other.”
—Booklist
Fingersmith
2002 Booker Prize Finalist
“Oliver Twist with a twist: female and sexually aware…This is a Victorian novel the Victorians never dreamed of writing…. An absorbing tale that withholds as much as it discloses. A pulsating story.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“A deftly plotted thriller with two equally compelling heroines…An absorbing and elegant story that’s old-fashioned in the best way.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“There are always novels that you envy people for not yet having read, for the pleasures they still have to come. Well, this is one. Long, dark, twisted, and satisfying, it’s a fabulous piece of writing, but Waters’s most impressive achievement is that she also makes it feel less like reading, more like living: an unforgettable experience.”
—The Guardian
“A marvelous pleasure.”
—The Washington Post
“Deliciously brazen…a sophisticated treat.
—Los Angeles Times
“[The] energetic plot bristles with scheming villains and lurid details…. Calls to mind the feverishly gloomy haunts of Charlotte and Emily Brontë…elaborate and satisfying.”
—The Seattle Times
“Wonderfully evocative…Fantastic and foggy atmospherics…A strong literary work with memorable female characters, à la Moll Flanders or a Brontë heroine…Splendid.”
—USA Today
“A sweeping read.”
—The Boston Globe
“Waters writes convincingly of Victorian life, evoking Dickens in her rhythms, Henry James in her examination of social order…. A haunting, disturbing, and lovely ode to the universal frailties of the human condition.”
—Rocky Mountain News
“The most breathtaking twist I’ve read in recent months. Fingersmith is everything a really good historical thriller should be: convincing, engaging, and surprising.”
—Toronto Star
“A modern Wilkie Collins…Brutal, daring, and refreshing…It’s a thriller, yes, but it’s also a love story—a sexy, passionate, and startling one…. Erotic and unnerving in all the right ways.”
—The Guardian
“Waters slowly and inexorably builds the tension in this hard-to-put-down novel, which is full of atmospheric details about grand houses, petty slums, and Victorian madhouses. Readers will turn the pages with delighted dread.”
—Library Journal
“[An] extraordinary novel…. It is a rare pleasure to discover a writer as startlingly assured and original as Waters.”
—The Sunday Times (London)
“A densely plotted Gothic thriller that is equal parts saucy melodrama and women’s history.”
—The Village Voice
“Brilliant and chilling storytelling…Vivid…Unforgettable.”
—The Sunday Telegraph
“Sarah Waters unveils enough secrets, reversals, and revelations to keep the most demanding fans of Victorian fiction happy and enthralled, bowing to the great novels of Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens in ways that are both fanciful and intelligent…. Skillful plotting and plenty of surprises.”
—New Statesman
“One of the best books I’ve ever read…A startling plot twist…Nothing in this story is as it seems, and as point of view shifts between Sue and Maud, the reader is in for surprise after surprise.”
—St. Paul Pioneer Press
Affinity
Winner of the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award
Winner of the Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian and Gay Fiction
Winner of the Somerset Maugham Award
Winner of the ALA GLBT Roundtable Book Award
“The author of Tipping the Velvet displays her incredible talent for the Gothic historical novel in this splendid book about a Victorian women’s prison and the affair there between an inmate and a ‘lady visitor.’”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Unfolds sinuously and ominously…a powerful plot-twister. The book is multidimensional: a naturalistic look at Victorian society; a truly suspenseful tale of terror; and a piece of elegant, thinly veiled erotica…subtly sensual. Like a Ouija board, Affinity offers different messages to different readers, scaring the shrouds off everyone in the process.”
—USA Today
“Gothic tale, psychological study, puzzle narrative—Sarah Waters’s second novel is all of these wrapped into one, served up to superbly suspenseful and hypnotic effect…supremely visual…. This is gripping, astute fiction that feeds the mind and senses.”
—The Seattle Times
“[A] haunting study of lust in the shadows of Victorian England set against the backdrop of the late-nineteenth century’s fascination with psychic spiritualism…. An intriguing and accomplished novel, both scary and cerebral at the same time…Superb.”
—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Waters has perfect pitch in her representations of bourgeois Victorian life, the puritanical misery of prisons in the 1870s, and the spiritualist subculture…. A deeply absorbing book.”
—The Advocate
Tipping the Velvet
A New York Times Notable Book
“Wonderful…A sensual experience that leaves the reader marveling at the author’s craftsmanship, idiosyncrasy, and sheer effort.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Erotic and absorbing…Written with startling power…Buoyant and accomplished. If lesbian fiction is to reach a wider readership, Waters is the person to carry the banner.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Compelling…Readers of all sexes and orientations should identify with this gutsy hero as she learns who she is and how to love.”
—Newsday
“Big, bawdy…a story of working-class guts and sexual bravado. Run, don’t walk; this is a rare treat.”
—Out magazine
“Lusty and lavish, richly embroidered and boldly rendered, Tipping the Velvet is an amazingly assured debut novel…. An exquisitely penned, rapidly paced, thoroughly entertaining tale that leaves the reader wanting more.”
—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Delectable…written in roguishly lilting prose filled with the sights, sounds, and stenches of London street life.”
—The Seattle Times
“Warning: Do not open Tipping the Velvet if you have calls to make, clothes to launder, or deadlines to meet. Just give up and head for the beach until you finish this riotously sexy epic of lesbian London at the dawn of the twentieth century…. Waters is a spellbinding storyteller.”
—The Advocate