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HOUSE GUESTS

THE bestselling author suggests key novels to help you through the trickier times in life. ‘WELL, thank God they’ve gone,’ is a phrase often spoken by hosts on doorsteps, waving a cheery goodbye to certain departing guests.

You know the sort: the ones who never wash up or choose that weekend to sleep-train their baby. You work non-stop, give them what is in effect a free holiday; they just turn up with a bottle from Duty Free.

So why do we do it? It’s such an intimacy, letting people into our homes and our families. It comes with all sorts of risk.

In Tessa Hadley’s The Past, four siblings go back for the last time to their grandparent’s old house, expecting, like fools, a nice trip down the family’s memory lane.

But this time, they have two outsiders — a new wife and a randy 19-year-old. Instead of a holiday, they get a threeweek drama of tension and revelation. Frankly, they would have been happier in separate hotels.

Frances Wray, in The Paying Guests, has to open up her home. It’s 1922, she’s a spinster living with her widowed mother. Her beloved brothers died in the war, her father left a mountain of debt. It’s her miserable lot to wash and polish for the young couple who rent a room.

Then, somewhere in this cycle of domestic drudgery, she unexpectedly finds fun and passion and love. This being a Sarah Waters novel, that love is of the forbidden kind and post-war society is without mercy. But it’s still better than a bottle from Duty Free.

The Smart family don’t invite Amber into their summer rental in Norfolk. They don’t even know her. She is ‘The Accidental’ — she just turns up. The mother, Eve, presumes she is one of her husband’s many girlfriends, troubled adolescent, Magnus, thinks she is an angel — he could be right.

They’re a dysfunctional lot before Amber gets to work on them; by the end they’re for ever changed. In this playful story, Ali Smith makes the case for letting outsiders into our families; that bit of magic they can bring.