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Part erotic thriller, part psychological study, part murder mystery, The Paying Guests is an intricate tale that will keep you on the edge of your seat. Frances and her mother live in a large estate in a small English village, but after having lost all the male members of their family in the war, they are [...]

I went through an unplanned blogging hiatus this summer, which meant that a lot of books and movies that I would have liked to write about ended up unreported (though some of them will be showing up in my forthcoming year's best list).  Still, it seemed wrong to end the year without another look at what I've been reading (one of the things I'd like to get back to next year is full-length book

Few topics are more contentious at Powell's than agreeing on the "best" works of fiction. Our tastes run the gamut from experimental tragicomedies to multi-generational sagas to offbeat coming-of-age tales to surreal character studies... and so on. As such, rather than present selections from one perspective, we thought it wise to get a more representative [...]

I could not put down this tender, haunting, harrowing novel — I read it by campfire light, I read it walking down the street, I read it in bed till my eyes wouldn't stay open. Waters creates a world with her precise observation of atmosphere, emotion, and gesture; her characters live. The Paying Guests is [...]

Authors including Neil Gaiman and Ian Rankin will collaborate with the public in a short story "Tweetathon" organised by the Society of Authors.

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Because I loved Sarah Waters' The Night Watch, I eagerly purchased her newest, The Little Stranger back in May, shortly after it had been released here in the states. If I wasn't precisely certain about the premise, I knew that I could trust Waters' sentence-by-sentence sensibility and her immaculate grasp of Britain in the 1940s, which is when this book takes place.

It took me awhile, frankly, to sink in with the story. I found dozens of reasons not to keep going, to look elsewhere, to read other books in between, for the first 100 pages seemed static, possessed of a when-will-something-happen? quality that thwarted my best intentions. Still, this was Waters and so last evening, I sat down with The Little Stranger and told myself that I could do nothing else until I'd finished her book.

I'm glad that I persevered. There is much to learn from the way that Waters fashions sentences and takes her time in this story about a country doctor, a crumbling British estate, and a family that one-by-one succumbs to the possibility of poltergeists. Whether or not this estate house is actually haunted (or simply occupied by increasingly hallucinating persons) is the open question that dominates this book. Waters does an outstanding job of leaving the matter unsettled. She is also enormously adept at imagining the many ways that a ghost might knock about a house, and she does a classy job of making the strange seem absolute—of pushing the impossible up against the mundane, of presenting multiple varieties of innocence and blame, and of leaving it all for the reader to decide.

I enjoyed watching Waters work throughout these pages. Often I stopped to reflect on how different my own approach to storytelling is. I believe, for one thing, in the power of the unsaid and the unseen—in deliberate gaps and break points. Waters believes in methodically exposing every detail, then taking at least one other (sometimes two) glance(s) back. There's something in that, certainly, something to be learned, though the part of me that seeks out the liquid in stories, did hope, in parts, for more momentum here, and less of the claustrophic.

Still, it was by and large a pleasurable read, and now here I am, just back from the bookstore—my second trip in two days. I've got many titles here that I hope to soon be sharing with you. But for now I'm going to take a small reading break and finally fit The Little Stranger up on the shelf.

The books are stacking taller and taller about my tiny house—beckoning, desired, and unread. No One You Know (Michelle Richmond), which I won from Presenting Lenore, who lists it as a favorite book. Halfway House (Katharine Noel) and Home Schooling (Carol Windley)—gifts from a certain editor at Grove. John the Baptizer, by Brooks Hansen, a long-time friend and an Alane Mason author, Alane being my first editor. The Language of Things (Deyan Sudjic), also an Alane book, and The Little Strangers (Sarah Waters), because I adored Waters' The Night Watch and because I trust the independent film producer who suggested that I add Strangers to my list. The Elegance of the Hedgehog (Muriel Barbery), because everyone is talking about it. Brooklyn (Colm Toibin) and Let the Great World Spin (Colum McCann), because they are books by two of my favorite living writers.

I have been out, I have been dancing, I have been taking photographs, I have been Body Pumping and Zumba-ing and walking the streets of Philadelphia and running this business of mine. I have not been reading, and I have barely been writing, and I've gotten that ache in my bones.

It is 6:40 AM, a Sunday.

Today I read.