Sarah Waters’ chilling and vividly rendered ghost story set in postwar Britain, brimming with rich atmosphere and psychological complexity.
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.
Sarah Waters
About the Author
Sarah Waters has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times - in 2002, 2006 and 2009. Her novels have won the Betty Trask Award and the Somerset Maugham Award and have also been shortlisted for the Orange Prize.Video highlights
Fingersmith on screen
In 2016, Korean director Park Chan-wook released The Handmaiden, which was inspired by Fingersmith.
The Handmaiden transported the action of the book from Victorian-era Britain to Korea under Japanese colonial rule.
Another Gaze said the film was ‘a brilliantly dark ode to women’s desire and autonomy: a subject that remains as pressing today as it was a century ago’.
Kim Min-hee and Kim Tae-ri in The Handmaiden, 2016.
© Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock PhotoThe fact that Fingersmith received a lot of positive attention actually made me a bit anxious
Listen to an extract from Fingersmith
Juanita McMahon brings Sarah Waters’ tale of an orphan who grows up among thieves to life.
Hachette Audio UK · Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
Waters spins an absorbing tale that withholds as much as it discloses
Other nominated books by Sarah Waters
Sarah Waters’ engaging fiction about four Londoners whose lives and secrets during and after the Second World War connect in often startling ways.
