(Sarah Waters reads at Elliott Bay Book Company tomorrow night at 7 pm. The reading is free.)
Guests is set in London just after World War I. On the first page, we meet Frances Wray, a single woman who lives in a large house with her mother. All the men of the house are gone, dead in the war, and the once-proper Wrays have slid from the upper class, though they still clutch at decorum and the naive hope that they'll one day be reinstated with the elite. They've gotten rid of all their servants, and circumstances finally force them to take on boarders in order to pay the bills. A young married couple named Leonard and Lilian Barber take a room with the Wrays, and for a while, Guests is a comedy of manners as the Wrays attempt to keep up appearances (Frances's mother is simultaneously appalled that her daughter has to clean the floors and disgusted that Frances did not do a better job of cleaning the floors) and adjust to living with a man again:
There was more jaunty whistling, in the days that followed. There were more yodeling yawns at the top of the stairs. There were sneezes, too—those loud masculine sneezes, like shouts into the hand, that Frances could remember from the days of her brothers; sneezes that for some reason never came singly, but arrived as a volley and led inevitably to a last-trump blowing of the nose.
Because the Wrays are relentless practitioners of politesse, the tension begins to build. It only increases when Lilian and Frances begin to feel flutters of romantic love...
