It is 1922 and Frances Wray lives with her mother in their large, formerly elegant London home which they can no longer afford to maintain, much less keep servants for. Enter the Barbers, a young couple of the clerk class whose rent payments for some rooms upstairs will ease their financial troubles. Frances and Lillian Barber form a clandestine union with disastrous consequences. Waters' writing is, as always, extraordinarily vivid. The reader feels and sees Frances as she labors in her lonely domestic chores and eats her shabby meals with her mother. Waters depicts the tension of the era, in which large numbers of returned soldiers are disabled, out of work, and brutalized by the violence they have experienced in Europe. And she maintains a remarkable balance of perfectly observed history and setting with strong narrative tension.
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