Thomas Jones writes:

Sarah Waters’s novels – the first three set in the Victorian era, the more recent two in the 1940s – have always been interested in the ways in which English society has disposed of its more awkward or inconvenient members by locking them away in various kinds of institution. The secondary narrator in Affinity (1999) is a medium imprisoned in Millbank in the 1870s for fraud and assault. In Fingersmith (2002), a postmodern take on the Victorian sensation novel and in particular a reimagining of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, a plan is hatched to steal an heiress’s fortune by tricking her into an unsuitable marriage and having her committed to an insane asylum. Parts of The Night Watch (2006) are set in a jail during the Second World War, where conscientious objectors are among the prisoners who watch the bombs fall on London through the bars of their cell windows.

The narrator of Waters’s new book, The Little Stranger, is a GP in rural Warwickshire in the years immediately after the war. Dr Faraday demonstrates a cavalier willingness to bundle his patients off into long-term residential psychiatric care, more or less on his say-so; the second opinion of one of his obliging colleagues is a mere formality. Yet as the novel progresses, the balance of Faraday’s own mind is called increasingly into question. Who is sane enough to say who is mad?

(LRB 9 July 2009)

Virago | hardback 501 pp. |ISBN: 9781844086016