From the multi-award-winning and bestselling author of The Night Watch and Fingersmith comes an astonishing novel about love, loss, and the sometimes unbearable weight of the past. In a dusty post-war summer in rural Warwickshire, a doctor is called to see a patient at lonely Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the once grand house is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its garden choked with weeds. All around, the world is changing, and the family is struggling to adjust to a society with new values and rules. Roddie Ayres, who returned from World War II physically and emotionally wounded, is desperate to keep the house and what remains of the estate together for the sake of his mother and his sister, Caroline. Mrs. Ayres is doing her best to hold on to the gracious habits of a gentler era and Caroline seems cheerfully prepared to continue doing the work a team of servants once handled, even if it means having little chance for a life of her own beyond Hundreds. But as Dr. Faraday becomes increasingly entwined in the Ayreses’ lives, signs of a more disturbing nature start to emerge, both within the family and in Hundreds Hall itself. And Faraday begins to wonder if they are all threatened by something more sinister than a dying way of life, something that could subsume them completely. Both a nuanced evocation of 1940s England and the most chill-inducing novel of psychological suspense in years, The Little Stranger confirms Sarah Waters as one of the finest and most exciting novelists writing today.

Soon to be a major motion picture, directed by Lenny Abrahamson and starring Domhnall Gleeson and Ruth Wilson. "The #1 book of 2009...Several sleepless nights are guaranteed."—Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly One postwar summer in his home of rural Warwickshire, Dr. Faraday, the son of a maid who has built a life of quiet respectability as a country physician, is called to a patient at lonely Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the Georgian house, once impressive and handsome, is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable yard permanently fixed at twenty to nine. Its owners—mother, son, and daughter—are struggling to keep pace with a changing society, as well as with conflicts of their own. But are the Ayreses haunted by something more sinister than a dying way of life? Little does Dr. Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become intimately entwined with his.

When Dr. Faraday, a Warwickshire physician, pays a visit to the Ayres family at their Hundreds Hall estate, he unknowingly enters a wickedly haunted house. His life soon becomes entwined with a family plagued by a terrifying past.

All the kids from Wayside School had to spend 243 days in horrible schools while Wayside was closed to get rid of the infestation of cows! Now the kids are back and the fun begins again on every floor. Miss Mush has prepared a special lunch of baked liver in purple sauce and it is pet day on the 30th floor. There are dogs and cats and frogs and skunks and an orange named Fido, causing a terrible commotion. But the biggest surprise of all is that Mrs Jewls is expecting a baby and a substitute teacher is coming, and everyone knows what that means . . . Wayside School is going to get a little stranger.

Lisa Olstein's third collection reverberates with twinned realities: wonder and terror, beauty and difficulty, celebration and lament. Through encounters with science, war, art, animals, and motherhood, Little Stranger explores the exigencies of close attention, the tenuousness of attachment, and the ever more rapidly shifting nature of knowledge. Intimate lyrics, elegies, and narratives speak in voices familiar yet strange. Lisa Olstein's debut collection of poetry, Radio Crackling, Radio Gone (Copper Canyon Press, 2006), won the Hayden Carruth Award, and her second volume, Lost Alphabet (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), was named a "Best Poetry Book of the Year" by Library Journal. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Daisy needs to hire a new nanny for her son; the efficient and capable Margaret Pride appears to be the perfect candidate. But as Daisy becomes increasingly removed from family life and the nanny becomes more prominent, oddities in Margaret's behaviour soon surface. Masterfully constructed and crackling with tension, A Little Stranger reveals that self-deception can be just as dangerous as the deceit of others.

Daisy needs to hire a new nanny for her son; the efficient and capable Margaret Pride appears to be the perfect candidate. But as Daisy becomes increasingly removed from family life and the nanny becomes more prominent, oddities in Margaret's behaviour soon surface. Masterfully constructed and crackling with tension, A Little Stranger reveals that self-deception can be just as dangerous as the deceit of others.