Waiting on Wednesday: The Paying Guests

"Waiting on Wednesday" is a weekly event, hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating. Autumn is usually a season with great new releases in fiction, and this year appears to be no exception.

Here is the book that I am most anxiously awaiting at the moment . . .

The Paying Guests is the new novel from Sarah Waters, set for release on September 16th. Here's the publisher's description:

It is 1922, and London is tense. Ex-servicemen are disillusioned; the out-of-work and the hungry are demanding change. And in South London, in a genteel Camberwell villa -- a large, silent house now bereft of brothers, husband, and even servants -- life is about to be transformed as impoverished widow Mrs. Wray and his spinster daughter, Frances, are obliged to take in lodgers.

With the arrival of Lilian and Leonard Barber, a modern young couple of the "clerk class," the routines of the house will be shaken up in unexpected ways. Little do the Wrays know just how profoundly their new tenants will alter the course of Frances's life -- or, as passions mount and frustration gathers, how far-reaching, and how devastating, the disturbances will be.

Yeah . . . I really want to read that! My eagerness is making me jittery (or is that the coffee?). Give me that book!

I have read only one Sarah Waters book previously, The Little Stranger. I didn't absolutely love it, but it was a very interesting read, and it has stayed with me in ways I wouldn't have expected. The Paying Guests seems to cover some of the same themes--class boundaries, gender roles, the social upheaval after a great war--but without the supernatural element of The Little Stranger (which I found problematic, actually). For some reason, the description of Waters' latest offering is really striking a chord. The reviews I've read at this point are kind of mixed . . . but something tells me that I shouldn't read too much about the novel before diving in myself.

Does The Paying Guests sound like something you would read? What new fall releases are you eagerly awaiting?