I chose Affinity to read on the plane during my vacation because so far, when I read Sarah Waters, the whole world falls away and I can't stop reading! Before this, I read The Little Stranger and Fingersmith, and I thought both of them were totally fun and almost pitch-perfect Victorian novels that include things that actual Victorian novels don't touch.
In Affinity, a wealthy young woman, Margaret Prior, begins volunteering at a women's prison as a "lady visitor." She's there, ostensibly, to provide an example to the criminals and to give them the chance to speak to someone: they aren't allowed to talk to each other and spend most of their days in silence. Margaret's motives and past are unclear from the start. What she doesn't tell us about herself emerges when she develops a fascination with one prisoner, a medium convicted of false spiritualism.
I was a little disappointed by Affinity-- in a lot of ways, it seemed like a version of Fingersmith written before the actual finished object, as though Waters was testing out ideas. This, plus awkwardly-included Foucaultian theory and a very lagging middle part narrated by an increasingly wimpy protagonist (same thing happened in the Little Stranger!), would have ruined the book for me, but the last 75 pages or so had amazing momentum.
