Affinity, Paperback/Sarah Waters

Gothic tale, psychological study, puzzle narrative This is gripping, astute fiction that feeds the mind and senses. The Seattle Times An upper-class woman recovering from a suicide attempt, Margaret Prior has begun visiting the women s ward of Millbank prison, Victorian London s grimmest jail, as part of her rehabilitative charity work. Amongst Millbank s murderers and common thieves, Margaret finds herself increasingly fascinated by on apparently innocent inmate, the enigmatic spiritualist Selina Dawes. Selina was imprisoned after a seance she was conducting went horribly awry, leaving an elderly matron dead and a young woman deeply disturbed. Although initially skeptical of Selina s gifts, Margaret is soon 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. As in her noteworthy deput, Tipping the Velvet , Sarah Waters brilliantly evokes the sights and smells of a moody and beguiling nineteenth-century London, and proves herself yet again a storyteller, in the words of the New York Times Book Review , of "startling power." "