The Little Stranger / Sarah Waters 463 pp.

I really wanted to like this one. Waters' The Night Watch was one of my most pleasant surprises of the past year, but Stranger was just not of the same caliber. Set in England a few years after the war, this is a ghost story and more. The Ayres family of Hundreds Hall, like so many families of land and 'quality' of the period, struggle to maintain their property and eat decently during the era when England's grand estates were abandoned under the crush of a rising middle class and its suburbanization. The family befriend Dr. Faraday, a talented GP from a working-class family who's always had a particular fascination for the beautiful but decaying Hundreds Hall. The writing is smart and the haunting believable; this would have been a terrific novella had it been cut by about 200 pages.