The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

In a dusty post-war summer in rural Warwickshire, a doctor is called to a patient at lonely Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the Georgian house, once grand and handsome, is now in decline, its masonry crumbling and its gardens choked with weeds. The 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 entwined with his.

As we start our new list for the year, we have been thrown the challenge of a supernatural theme in The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters. But as we made our way around the table, it was soon clear that most of us found much more than ghosts within the walls of Hundreds Hall.

In fact, a few of us took in little or none of the spirit world and found its basic theme more about class structure, power struggles and human frailties. Was there ever a ghost or poltergeist in Hundreds Hall? Well, we differed in our opinions on this and a few others points. Some found the story slow to start, with predictable character lines and there was also the opinion that the book could have been a few hundred pages shorter!

On the up side, there were those who found the writing style gripping with wonderfully descriptive passages of the old mansion in its post-war deterioration, effortlessly transporting the reader into the halls and ballrooms of the past. Alongside these views, we did all agree on one dominating theme, and that was the presence of the social class structure and how it was eroding during the post WWII era.

By the end of our discussion (and it was unanimously thought to be a good one) we more or less agreed that the story was never intended to have a neatly tied-up conclusion and that the many loose ends are intentionally left dangling. However, two very interesting points were tabled by Nadine and Denise, Firstly, Nadine felt that the book was highlighting the unexplainable, and how we as humans need to have a clear and definite answer to anything that we cannot logically explain. And then, in the end, whose explanation is the correct one ... and correct to who?

And then Denise brought up an idea that I don't think any of us had thought of. Is Waters doing a calculated study of the old established families and their mansions? Why are so many of them supposedly riddled with ghosts of the past? And are these ghosts and demons simply a manifestation of the family's frailties in an insecure world where their position and status is threatened? Is the house simply displaying the family's madness?

We don't really expect there to be answers to these questions, but it was certainly fun rifling through them and then coming no closer to the truth about The Little Stranger.