Sarah Waters

Visiting a grim Victorian London prison as part of rehabilitative charity work, upper-class suicide survivor Margaret Prior is drawn into the world of enigmatic spiritualist and inmate Selina Dawes and is persuaded to help her escape.

A tale set in World War II London finds a rescue worker struggling for composure after a bombing, a young woman longing for her soldier lover, and a convict who watches a battle through the bars of his window.

The story of Dr. Faraday, the son of a housemaid, who has built a life of quiet respectability as a country doctor. During the long hot summer of 1948, he is called to a patient at Hundreds Hall, where his mother once worked. But it is now in decline and its inhabitants, a mother, son, and daughter, are haunted by something more ominous than a dying way of life. When he takes on his new patient, Faraday has no idea how closely the family's story is...