Brit writer Sarah Waters impressed readers when her bold first novel Tipping the Velvet was published in 1999. That novel was interesting, but Waters keeps revving herself up, getting better and better. Affinity (2000), another one of her literary mysteries set in Victorian England in which two women must initially hint around about their love for one another, led London’s Sunday Times to name her Writer of the Year. Her new mystery, Fingersmith (Riverhead Books, $24.95), is one of the most narratively complex, pleasurable, and brilliant novels to come along in some time. It opens as Susan Trinder, a sensible adolescent orphan raised in a squalid little house of Hogarthian rakes and Dickensian fingersmiths (pickpockets), is persuaded that she can bilk a wealthy young lady of her fortune. She moves from London to the country to become the lady’s maid, but they become unexpectedly close, and … I’m mum from there on out, except to say that this is the best reading I’ve experienced this year. Waters will be at BookPeople on Wednesday, February 13, at 7pm.
Poet Jean Valentine, left, (The River at Wolf; Growing Darkness, Growing Light) has been at SWT this week teaching and giving readings. She’ll give a reading at the Katherine Anne Porter Literary Center in Kyle at 7:30pm on Monday, February 11. For directions, visit www.english.swt.edu/kap/contactpage5.html or call 512/245-2581… Last year, Spike Gillespie sat “like Jo March up in the Little Women attic with her writing cap on” banging out a novel, Thebelljar.net: a dot-novel, now online. Since she says “sitting down is about the hardest thing in the world for me,” she’s going to celebrate the novel’s completion by hosting BookPeople’s Second Annual Valentine’s Day Erotica Party on Thursday, February 14, at 7pm. “Recommended for immature adults,” BookPeople says.
This article appears in February 8 • 2002.