Sarah Waters - Affinity

A rare book that details two women's lives without giving all the answers. Maintaining interest and anticipation throughout. Like Margaret the reader is left stunned and empty at the end. As heart-break is something most people can relate to you feel touched on a personal level. Suddenly the whole book makes sense, coming full-circle and bringing characters once thought irrelivant to the forefront. We are drawn up to the hights of passion and dropped from them into the depths of betrayal without a care. A deep and fascinating novel.

"Affinity" is a moving and subtly erotic novel that deftly and surprisingly carries the reader into the passionate embrace of a prison and its female inmates. Selina, a Spiritualist inmate subtly entices Margaret, a young lonely spinster, with her psychic charms and alluring sensuality.

Falling prey to Selina's charms, Margaret is thrust into a world of hidden love, Spiritualism and mediumship, culminating in heart-throbbing illicit and emotionally-charged endeavors. The reader is drawn into the underworld of the psychic medium, worlds beyond our own, and the sweet love that pulls Margaret deeper into the prison world. The twist at the end is piquant - like a honey-dripped lemon. Taste the wonder of Sarah Water's "Affinity."

The book 'Sarah Waters Affinity' is about a relationship that develops between two Victorian women. One is Margaret, a lady of fairly good social standing who is pretty much past marriageable age and is recovering from some kind of deep (and initially unspecified) emotional trauma, perhaps connected to the death of her father. The other is Selena, a spiritualist who has been jailed for alleged assault and fraud.

The story takes the form of a series of diary entries from both the main characters. It begins with Margaret deciding to become a "Lady Visitor" at a nearby London prison, in the hope that this will somehow take her mind off her recent trauma. There she meets Selena, a discredited spiritualist who fascinates her, and a compelling relationship begins. As the book progresses, both Margaret and the reader are more and more drawn to Selena, and gradually become convinced that she is not a fraud. I can't tell you what happens at the end, but I will say that it affected me strongly for days after I finished the book.