Louise is a midcentury British housewife struggling to deal with the sleepless nights caused by her baby's nighttime crying sessions. Needing additional income, she and her husband Mark decide to rent out the spare room to a teacher from the local girls' school. But Louise is worried by the new boarder's mysterious comings and goings, her apparent flirtation with Mark, and her excessive interest in their baby. Is Louise right to be suspicious, or is she merely losing her grip on reality from lack of sleep?

This book is a predecessor of the domestic thrillers with unreliable female narrators that are so popular today. It's very well-written and the suspense is handled adroitly and kept me turning the pages. Louise is a sympathetic character whose unreliability comes not from ulterior motives but simply from the amount of stress she is under. Because of the book's age, however, the thrills will probably seem pretty tame to thriller readers of today.

The reason to read this book today is not so much the plot but the harrowing description of Louise's life as a housewife and mother before the days of labor-saving machines like dishwashers and dryers and before the concept of shared parenting duties. Louise's husband screams at her to "Shut that baby up!" when their son's crying wakes him at night, and he thinks nothing of coming home unannounced in the middle of the day and demanding an appetizing cooked hot lunch that his wife is expected to provide, in addition to the lunch she gives their two daughters when they come home from school. Laundry is a task that takes days; the children are considered to be exclusively the wife's responsibility -- so much so that at one point on an outing, the husband gets annoyed and goes home, leaving his wife with the three children. And how does Louise react to this treatment? She feels sorry for him for having to put up with her subpar housewife skills. If you have ever wondered why a book like The Feminine Mystique was a necessary revelation for so many women in the 1960s, read this book and you'll get it. ( )

Like "The Yellow Wallpaper," but good. ( )

Louise a put upon housewife with 3 siblings lives in middle class splendour with a husband unable or unwilling to help by taking joint responsibility for the day to day management of a busy household. This is a novel of its time set in late 1950's England when it was supposedly expected for the man of the house to be the bread winner and his wife to attend not only to a busy daily routine but also a demanding sibling schedule and a lazy needy husband.

Into this chaos steps Miss Brandon her role as housekeeper to alleviate the stress that colours every waking moment. It soon becomes apparent that Miss Brandon has a hidden agenda and may not be quite as charming or helpful as she appears on first blush. This is an enjoyable, forgotten (until recently) suburban tale that it could be argued paves the way for the deluge of psychological thrillers that now confronts a sometimes confused reader on a daily basis. Will Miss Brandon reveal her true self? Will the husband finally accept his parental responsibility and by so doing allow Louise to embrace the only thing that she really wants.....a good nights sleep! ( )

An early relative of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, a domestic drama with an unreliable narrator (well, she's reliable, but she's so sleep-deprived that she gets confused), and a wonderful sense of lurking danger without being sure what might be coming and who might be the cause.

The author does a wonderful job of capturing the sensation of just-barely-coping with a baby who won't sleep--I'll never forget that--and is worth reading for that alone. It's beautifully written, she's a marvelous writer.

If you're expecting an action-packed thrill ride, this is not the book. Aside from a few moments of high drama, not that much happens. But it's still a page-turner!

(Note: 5 stars = amazing, wonderful, 4 = very good book, 3 = decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. I'm fairly good at picking for myself so end up with a lot of 4s). ( )

My mother had this book in her collection in the 1960s. I read it then and thought it so very good I have looked for it ever since. Last week I found it at Uncle Edgar's Bookshop in south Minneapolis. It really is as thrilling a read as I remembered! Today it is a bit dated because Louise, the main character, is the traditional 1950s housewife, but you can still identify with her and with the buildup of tension and then fear in the novel. ( )