Affinity is a tale of power and possession that Henry James himself might admire. In her first novel, Tipping the Velvet, Sarah Waters explored secrets and longing--capping off this lesbian romp with a utopian-socialist vision. Her intricate follow-up is just as sensual but infinitely darker, its moral more difficult to descry. Its stylistic and psychological rewards, however, are visible at every turn, the author's persuasive imagination matched by her gift for storytelling.

In late September 1874, Margaret Prior makes her way through the pentagons of London's Millbank Prison, a place of fearful symmetry and endless corridors. This plain woman on the verge of 30 has come to comfort those behind bars, several of whom Waters brings to instant, sad life. And our Lady Visitor plans to take her role dead seriously, having recovered from two years of nervous indolence in her family's Chelsea house. One person, however, makes her job a passion. Opening an inspection slit (or "eye" as these devices are known), Margaret hears "a perfect sigh, like a sigh in a story." Peering inward, she's confronted by the most erotic of visions--a woman turned toward the sun, caressing her cheek with a forbidden violet: "As I watched, she put the flower to her lips, and breathed upon it, and the purple of the petals gave a quiver and seemed to glow..."

Selina Dawes may indeed have the face of a Crivelli angel, but this medium is in for fraud and assault, her last session having gone very badly indeed. Suffice it to say that the first full encounter between these two very different women is enthralling. "You think spiritualism a kind of fancy," Selina riddles. "Doesn't it seem to you, now you are here, that anything might be real, since Millbank is?" And soon enough Margaret receives several viable signs of the supernatural: a locket disappears from her room, flowers mysteriously appear, and her dazzling friend knows everything about her. Strangest of all, Selina seems to love her.

As Margaret records her weekly prison forays, her own past comes into focus, notably her plans to travel to Italy with her first love (who is now her sister-in-law). But her current journal, she convinces herself, is to be very different from her last one, which "took as long to burn as human hearts, they say, do take." Meanwhile, Waters offers a narrative two-for-one, placing Margaret's diary cheek by jowl with Selina's chronicle of her pre-Millbank existence. This dispassionate, staccato record initially suggests that we can separate truth from desire. Or can we? What Waters's haunting creation leaves us with is a more painful reality--that knowledge and belief are entirely different things. --Kerry Fried


The New York Times Book Review, Nancy Willard
There are two kinds of mystery novels. The first gives us the crime and the clues; the guilty party is then unmasked and the mystery solved. In the other, the crime is solved but not the mystery, which arises from a dark corner of the human condition. Sarah Waters's remarkable second novel, Affinity, is both of these--and also a wrenching love story.


New York Magazine, Daniel Mendelsohn
Her first, Tipping the Velvet, was good; her second is just terrific. Moody, haunting, and haunted (it's about love among Victorian spiritualists), Affinity is two parts Wilkie Collins, with whose The Woman in White it shares an obsession with prisons, madness, journal-keeping, and elaborate, carefully engineered deceits; and just a dash of Jeanette Winterson for up-to-the-minute lesbian-historical-fiction flavor. ("He, she--you ought to know that in the spheres there are no differences like that.")


USA Today, June 26, 2000
The book is multidimensional: a truly suspenseful tale of terror; and a piece of elegant, thinly veiled erotica.

FROM OUR EDITORS

Waters Runs Deep

Sarah Waters's first novel, Tipping the Velvet, had a brilliantly literary tone and a fresh new voice that garnered her a diverse audience, great critical acclaim, and laudatory reviews. Waters's look at the intimate relationships between several women in late 19th-century London tapped into the feminine mystique in a uniquely compelling way, touching on the effects of the sociopolitical upheaval of that time and the women's inherent sensuality. Now, in another story about women pulling together and coming together, this promising new writer produces yet another tour de force with Affinity, a haunting tale of ghosts, spiritualism, betrayal, and survival. Though the time period is essentially the same, this time Waters chooses a seedier, darker setting: the women's ward at London's Millbank prison.

Twenty-something Margaret Prior comes from one of London's finer families, but that doesn't protect her from suffering a very common malady: a broken heart. She attempts suicide by overdosing on laudanum and as part of her therapy following this attempt, she volunteers to visit inmates on the women's ward at nearby Millbank prison. Here she finds herself mingling with a wide array of women whose social backgrounds range from street beggars to London's upper crust. Their stories are as equally diverse and intriguing as they are suspect, from the petty thieves who stole food to assuage their hunger to cold-blooded murderers who killed for little more than revenge.

Although the plights of these sad women help take Margaret's mind off her broken heart, she can't completely put her lover out of her mind. Complicating that problem are two things. The first is that Margaret can talk to no one about her affair and is forced to keep her battered emotions bottled up inside to avoid a heinous scandal. The second is the stress of proximity, for her lover is another woman, one who is about to marry Margaret's brother. Desperate to get past her pain, Margaret throws herself into the prison environment and soon becomes curiously drawn to one young woman who, like most of the others, declares her innocence. But this woman, Selina Dawes, is intriguingly different.

For one thing, Selina claims to be a spiritualist and blames the crime for which she is being punished -- fraud and battery -- on a ghost. At first Margaret thinks this is just another story -- albeit a more inventive one than most -- designed to cover up true guilt. But before long, Margaret has reason to rethink things. First she delves into Selina's background and discovers several things that lend credence to Selina's claims. Then mysterious things start to happen that seem to support the existence of a spiritual world. Selina demonstrates her intimate knowledge of happenings in Margaret's life -- things she has no way of knowing. Plus, certain items appear -- a bloody collar and a braided hank of hair -- and disappear -- Margaret's favorite, treasured locket. Convinced that Selina is indeed innocent, and growing more captivated by this enigmatic woman with each passing day, Margaret thinks up a plan for escape from Millbank, one that will allow her and Selina to be together. But her plans go horribly awry and set both women on a devastating course of hope and betrayal that will leave one of them forever changed.

Waters tells her story in a circular fashion that switches back and forth in both time and points of view. Through the two women's respective journals, readers experience both Margaret's day-to-day relationship with Selina and the past events in Selina's life that led up to her conviction and imprisonment. In this manner, Waters plumbs the vast array of emotions inherent in the women themselves and in their relationship with one another, exposing heightened passions, frightening vulnerabilities, and a truly mesmerizing world of the supernatural.

Waters's expansive knowledge of the period brings turn-of-the-century London brilliantly alive. Her flair for colorful, vivid imagery makes the sights, sounds, smells, and feel of the dank prison seem frighteningly real, the horridly grim conditions adding layers of subtle character to its many denizens. Waters is clearly a writer of remarkable talent and, from its riveting opening scene to its shocking ending, Affinity is the perfect showcase for that talent.

—Beth Amos

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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 one 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 profoundly 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.

FROM THE CRITICS

Nancy Chinn - The Advocate

Waters has perfect pitch in her representations of bourgeois Victorian life, the puritanical misery of prisons in the 1870's, and the spiritualist subculture...she has created a compelling character in a deeply absorbing book.

USA Today

Readers must seek the answers in Affinity, which turns into a powerful plot-twister. The book is multidimensional: a naturalistic look at Victorian society; a truly suspenseful tale of terror; and a piece of elegant, thinly veiled erotica.

Nancy Willard - The New York Times Book Review