Sarah Waters revient vers les amours lesbiennes. Elle nous entraîne dans les années 1920, dans un quartier huppé de Londres, où Mme Wray et sa fille Frances, sans revenus depuis la guerre, se voient obligées de prendre des locataires. Un couple moderne, M. Léonard Barber et sa femme Lilian s'y installe et chamboule les habitudes bourgeoises des hôtes.

Les femmes vont se libérer, coûte que coûte! Roman sentimental, roman historique et roman policier. Sarah Waters aime la descripion et rendre compte minutueusement de stourments de l'âme et des méandres du désir.

From the bestselling author of The Little Stranger and Fingersmith, an enthralling novel about a widow and her daughter who take a young couple into their home in 1920s London. It is 1922, and London is tense. Ex-servicemen are disillusioned; the out-of-work and the hungry are demanding change. And in South London, in a genteel Camberwell villa-'a large, silent house now bereft of brothers, husband, and even servants-'life is about to be transformed as impoverished widow Mrs. Wray and her spinster daughter, Frances, are obliged to take in lodgers. With the arrival of Lilian and Leonard Barber, a modern young couple of the 'clerk class,' the routines of the house will be shaken up in unexpected ways. Little do the Wrays know just how profoundly their new tenants will alter the course of Frances's life-'or, as passions mount and frustration gathers, how far-reaching, and how devastating, the disturbances will be. Short-listed for the Man Booker Prize three times, Sarah Waters has earned a reputation as one of our greatest writers of historical fiction, and here she has delivered again. A love story, a tension-filled crime story, and a beautifully atmospheric portrait of a fascinating time and place, The Paying Guests is Sarah Waters's finest achievement yet.