Affinity (Paperback)
Description
An upper-class woman, recovering from a suicide attempt, visits the women's ward of Millbank prison as part of her rehabilitation. There she meets Selina, an enigmatic spiritualist-and becomes drawn into a twilight world of ghosts and shadows, unruly spirits and unseemly passions, until she is at last driven to concoct a desperate plot to secure Selina's freedom, and her own.
"Unfolds sinuously and ominously...a powerful plot-twister. The book is multidimensional: a naturalistic look at Victorian society; a truly suspenseful tale of terror; and a piece of elegant, thinly veiled erotica." (USA Today)
"Gothic tale, psychological study, puzzle narrative-Sarah Waters' second novel is all of these wrapped into one, served up to superbly suspenseful and hypnotic effect." (The Seattle Times)
Praise for Affinity…
“[Affinity] confirms Waters’ uncanny gift for establishing an instant connection between her readers and her flawed yet compelling central protagonists…she’s a novelist of major rank [who] probes into questions of difference and susceptibility, privilege and confinement, betrayal and loss—and there are few young writers out there who can match it.” —The Seattle Times
“The novel takes numerous surprising twists and turns before the startling resolution…superb…Waters pulls out all the stops.” —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“If lesbian fiction is to reach a wider readership, Waters is the person to carry the banner.”—The New York Times Book Review
“The author of Tipping the Velvet displays her incredible talent for the Gothic historical novel in this splendid book about a Victorian women’s prison and the affair there between an inmate and a ‘lady visitor.’” —The San Francisco Chronicle
“Unfolds sinuously and ominously…a powerful plot-twister. The book is multidimensional: a naturalistic look at Victorian society; a truly suspenseful tale of terror; and a piece of elegant, thinly veiled erotica…Like a Ouija board, Affinity offers different messages to different readers, scaring the shrouds off everyone in the process.”—USA Today
“Waters has perfect pitch in her representations of bourgeois Victorian life, the puritanical misery of prisons in the 1870s, and the spiritualist subculture…a deeply absorbing book.” —The Advocate
