Fingersmith

Sarah Waters offers an intriguing blend of mystery and suspense, secrets and betrayal in her evocative Victorian underworld page-turner.

London, 1862. Sue Trinder, orphaned at birth, grows up under the rough but loving care of Mrs Sucksby and her ‘family’ of unwanted babies turned artful dodgers - ‘fingersmiths’. When one of Mrs Sucksby’s scams places Sue as a lady’s maid to an orphan heiress in a sprawling Gothic mansion, the narrative explores even darker corners, among the pinched corsets and rustling skirts of Victorian England.

“Oliver Twist with a twist…Waters spins an absorbing tale that withholds as much as it discloses. A pulsating story.”  —  The New York Times Book Review 

"This is a Victorian novel the Victorians never dreamed of writing. Yet Waters keeps reminding us of what they did write … Metaphors about reading are scattered throughout the novel, suggesting the vicarious life Maud has to suffer while she is tied to her uncle's catalog of dirty books...Literature as enslaver, books as concealers of truth: Waters spins an absorbing tale that withholds as much as it discloses … She writes great Gothic, her descriptive skill augmented by an acute ear for dialogue."  -  Tom Gilling, The New York Times

Sarah Waters’ novels have won the Betty Trask Award and the Somerset Maugham Award and have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize. Her novels Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, Fingersmith and The Night Watch have all been adapted for television. Sarah Waters has been named Author of the Year four times: by the British Book Awards, the Booksellers’ Association, Waterstone’s Booksellers and the Stonewall Awards, and in 2019 she was awarded an OBE.