Atwood's novel has a broader interest in the world of mid-Victorian pseudo-sciences and early psychology, while Waters sticks to the world (or unworldly realm) of Spiritualism. The main character did begin to grate on me after a while, she was somewhat melodramatic and I didn't find myself rooting for her at all. Margaret is struggling mentally when the story begins: her father, the only person to appreciate her intellectual abilities to some extent, has died; the woman she was in love with chickened out and married her brother (and to add insult to injury, as a result is considered more grown-up than Margaret); and without any fulfilling focus in life she has few resources with which to combat depression. Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, Fingersmith and The Night Watch have all been adapted for television, The Little Stranger was adapted as a film by Lenny Abrahamson, and Fingersmith inspired Park Chan-wook's film, The Handmaiden. In the period I’ve been writing things have changed so enormously that it doesn’t feel like an urgent project any more, just to put lesbians on the page, just to put lesbians in the past.

As a woman of the now I have never experienced such a feeling of being completely powerless first hand, but Sarah Waters made me feel all of this for her Victorian heroines. Waters describes it as "fundamentally a novel about disappointment and loss and betrayal", as well as "real contact between people and genuine intimacy". The developing lesbian relationship between Frances and lodger Lilian Barber provides a complex backdrop for a murder investigation that takes up the latter half of the book. This isn’t a bad thing, so be glad that your mental health is squeaky clean and you can’t relate to a hopeless and miserable character.This book was adapted into a drama serial by Andrew Davies, and received much press attention when it was shown on BBC TV in 2002. And today she is happy to leave it to a new generation of novelists – such as Booker-longlisted Sally Rooney – to document contemporary love lives.

Affinity isn't the typical jump-out-of-the-closet horror novel, but for the reader who appreciates subtlety and who might feel a fine shiver when things don't feel quite right in the house, it can offer an incredibly suspenseful and terrifying read. The novel tells the interlinked tales of Kay, Viv, Helen, Julia and Duncan in 1947, then 1944 and ends (or rather, begins) in 1941.During a tour of the cells, she spots one of the prisoners holding a flower, which she knows is not allowed. Waters] displays her incredible talent for the Gothic historical novel in this splendid book about a Victorian women’s prison and the affair there between an inmate and a ‘lady visitor. There was a look on her face - it was not ambiguous at all now - a look of mingled shock, and nervousness, and embarrassment or shame. Pa used to say your face was like the red heart on a playing card--mine, he said, was like the diamond. Affinity is also a tale of desire and betrayal, with at its heart a vulnerable 'lady visitor' to Millbank Prison.

She scissored the curls away, and - toms, grow easily sentimental over their haircuts, but I remember this sensation very vividly - it was not like she was cutting hair, it was as if I had a pair of wings beneath my shoulder-blades, that the flesh had all grown over, and she was slicing free.

Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. The story is told through the diary entries of both women, with the majority of entries coming from Margaret’s diary.