Paperback writers

The Paying Guests: By Sarah Waters. Virago, €11

For her new novel The Paying Guests, Waters rewinds to London in the 1920s, a sad, dilapidated place where ex-servicemen live out pale lives in the long shadow of war, and a generation of women mourn their husbands, brothers and friends. Faced with penury, Mrs Wray and her daughter Frances are forced into a money-making compromise: to keep their house and pay their bills they will have to take on renters (or, as ...