Shortlisted for both the Man Booker and Orange prizes, Waters’s satisfyingly chunky novel is a literary delight and a gripping page-turner. Set in the 1870s, it is the story of two young women brought up in radically different circumstances, yet both deprived of a childhood. Sue Trinder is raised in a south London house of Dickensian thievery and rough affection.

Maud is closeted away in rural Marlow at the beck and call of an eccentric, scholarly uncle. Waters’s plot brings the two women together, in a devious scheme designed to detach the wealthy Maud from a fortune she will inherit only on marriage. So far, so formulaic, but the twists and turns that Waters brings to her story will make you gasp. Like an accomplished conjuror, she performs one sleight of hand, then is into the next, while her audience is left stunned.

Her depiction of lowlife in “the Borough” is wonderfully observed; her petty crooks (fingersmiths) are real and likeable, yet a darker edge is revealed just when she, or the reader, might be in danger of sentimentalising them. In Maud’s Marlow home, by contrast, she subtly reveals the darker side of Victorian gentlemanly pursuits. Young Sue has the acuity of someone trained to live on her wits, Maud the hauteur of a woman used to being waited on, yet both are as vulnerable as children and ripe for exploitation. The writing is accomplished, the eroticism beautifully understated and, at 548 pages, it doesn’t seem a word too long.

FINGERSMITH by Sarah Waters

(Virago £7.99)

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