The Little Stranger

The Little Stranger is a Gothic novel by the British writer Sarah Waters, published in 2009. It is a ghost story set in rural Warwickshire in the 1940s, and it is her first novel written from a male point of view.

In the summer after the Second World War, Dr Faraday, a country doctor, is called out to Hundreds Hall, the Georgian house where his mother once worked as a servant and which he visited as a boy. It is now home to the Ayres family: a widowed mother, her adult son Roderick and her daughter Caroline.

Much of the estate has been sold off and the family can no longer afford to keep the house running. Roderick, who served in the war, is in poor health, and as the family's money and spirits decline, strange events around the house begin to accumulate.

Faraday, drawn back by his feelings for Caroline and by his own attachment to the house, has to judge whether the family is being haunted or simply coming apart. Waters leaves that question open, and the novel moves toward a tragedy.