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A Little Stranger
Candia McWilliam was a joint winner of the 1988 Betty Trask Award with "A Case of Knives", and her second novel tells - sometimes with humour - the story of two women whose blindness threatens their own lives and the future of a child. It is an intricately woven tale of domestic horror.
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First published June 26, 1989
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About the author
Candia McWilliam
27 books12 followersCandia McWilliam was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1955 and educated at Girton College, Cambridge. She won a Vogue writing competition in 1971 and worked for the magazine between 1976 and 1979.
Her first novel, the macabre A Case of Knives (1988), was joint winner of the Betty Trask Prize. It was followed by A Little Stranger, a disturbing tale of domestic life, in 1989. Both books won Scottish Arts Council Book Awards. Debatable Land (1994) won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the Italian Premio Grinzane Cavour for the best foreign novel of the year. The book follows the adventures of the crew of a yacht sailing from Tahiti to New Zealand, exploring each character's differing experience of loneliness and exile.
Her book, Wait till I Tell You (1997), is a collection of short stories. She is a regular reviewer for a number of newspapers.
Her latest book is What to Look for in Winter (2009).
Her first novel, the macabre A Case of Knives (1988), was joint winner of the Betty Trask Prize. It was followed by A Little Stranger, a disturbing tale of domestic life, in 1989. Both books won Scottish Arts Council Book Awards. Debatable Land (1994) won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the Italian Premio Grinzane Cavour for the best foreign novel of the year. The book follows the adventures of the crew of a yacht sailing from Tahiti to New Zealand, exploring each character's differing experience of loneliness and exile.
Her book, Wait till I Tell You (1997), is a collection of short stories. She is a regular reviewer for a number of newspapers.
Her latest book is What to Look for in Winter (2009).
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
July 17, 2025
A Little Stranger is told by Daisy and begins with the departure of a much-loved nanny and the arrival of a new one, Margaret Pride.
Daisy is part-Dutch, a work-from-home editor (a job she isn't sure is worthwhile), the mother of a small boy called John and the wife of a frequently absent but very wealthy husband called Solomon, who remains shadowy and with whom she has what might be described most charitably as an old-fashioned relationship. The family live in a house in the country, looked after by a cook plus indoor servants and outside staff, (plus the nanny).
The family's cook is called Lizzie. In Daisy's description of Lizzie, we see some of Candia McWilliam's talent as a writer. Lizzie, we learn, "was sensible and knew children, having had several, She was not discontented with repetition, but comforted by it, so that her cooking and her conversation had a soothing constancy. She was free of any urban compulsion to entertain, so she was always interesting". Daisy explains that John liked to sit beside Lizzie "as she made stew".
"She was free of any urban compulsion to entertain, so she was always interesting" - I loved this sentence.
McWilliam also gives us pen portraits of two very long-serving maids. Edie "looked like someone who might have a singular, solitary talent - marquetry or the violin". Bet, on the other hand "in private was unimaginable; she was entirely public...a tub with tiny hands and feet; she always wore high heels...she loved pretty things and was violently maternal. 'Oh John' she shouted, 'Oh look at you, I could eat you on toast.' From most people he flinched, but he loved Bet. She bought him presents she could not afford, and often asked to take him home with her. To John too this was an unspeakably glamorous prospect...Her husband bred fancy guinea-pigs with whorls in their fur; sometimes she brought one for John to look at, in a box, in the back of her car." The boxes are "as a rule from the supermarket, having contained slightly substandard crisps, or imperfect pizzas. Bet knew where to get seconds of the already most inedible foods; her best connection in this way was the friend who got her unlabelled cans." "Could be giblets, could be niblets, they're not fussy, but I must say I would not eat those dirty pheasants", Bet declares.
Food is everywhere in the novel and appetite is its central preoccupation. While Bet is not judged for eating rubbish, at the very start Margaret's suitability is questioned by the much-loved departing nanny, who disapproves of giving a child sweets, as Margaret has done. Daisy also does not find sweet things appealing. She tells us that she loves, "fresh, clean food, pickled and salted to an alerting brackishness", adding that "for lunch, I had eaten approximately seventy black olives, of the type which is wrinkled and black as tar on a summer road...accompanied...with a jug of black coffee" (as her husband does not share her taste, she explains that she eats the things he likes in the evening while "most days I ate a plateful of something he disliked for lunch ... smoked roes or raw steak or the vinegar of capers. Sometimes I even managed to find the gelatinous pinkish herring, 'haring", of my Dutch childhood").
Margaret's food, as described by Daisy, stands in stark contrast to these things:
"Margaret loved sweet things and her shopping bags were full of those strange foods made for consumers addicted to bulk and sweetness but desirous of no nourishment. She bought those strange costly foods whose colours are of an unconvincing brightness. She drank chocolate milk so thick it resembled a bodily secretion, cheesecake which sighed to the knife. At the end of each day she calculated the value in calories of all she had eaten. The refrigerator in the nursery kitchen was full of bright drinks in clear vessels like aqualungs, and bread the colour of snow. For butter she had grease which reeked faintly of town water and her jam contained neither fruit nor sugar but was red as ric-rac. She did not seem to be aware that a lettuce and an omelette made from our own eggs would taste better and do her less harm than these weightless hefty meals of cloud and promise. In brown bags, John's food had its own place in the refrigerator, unseductive and plain. "
Again McWilliam's phrasemaking impresses me - I will never look at flavoured milk in the same way, since reading "chocolate milk so thick it resembled a bodily secretion."
Daisy points out that: "Our farm produced meat, the garden vegetables, we had milk and eggs and the cook made bread. I wondered sometimes whether these things were too physical for Margaret to bear."
Daisy describes herself as an "ex-beauty" and at one point tells us that she is "quirky" - (and as a narrator she definitely is - at one point, she suddenly breaks whatever the equivalent of the fourth wall is in fiction and, after stating, "I read much too quickly and want really only to read long simple stories with happy endings", asks the reader, "Can you think of any?"). Her job is solitary and as a result of this and being surrounded by staff:
"Sometimes I talked too much, not having spoken to anyone for a time. When I did talk to people, they were frequently the wrong ones...I was not often alone but I was never precisely more than accompanied."
Having done similar solitary work while living in diplomatic households with an Edwardian number of staff, I empathise with Daisy when she describes how she feels in her unusual role (especially the three words "useless but essential"):
"Inside our house women worked; in the garden men were employed. There were two women who cleaned, and one who cooked; there was Margaret and there was me. No two of us were equal, though I felt that it was not I who established the hierarchy. There was me, useless but essential, with the others below, each at her allotted, or, it may have been, chosen, level."
McWilliam's writing is full of insight, but what keeps one reading this novel is a dread that builds as it progresses, a dread centred on Margaret, with her apron that reads "Have you hugged someone today" and her twee way of speaking: "To listen to her was to hear language strangled at birth." The sense of mounting unease and vague menace is similar to that felt while reading Turn of the Screw by Henry James.
Daisy becomes pregnant - "Once you are pregnant, you have an unbreakable appointment to meet a stranger", she tells us, which is a rather a good perception, I think. Be that as it may, Margaret gains a more dominant position in John's life as the pregnancy progresses, even taking him to London without Daisy, where Daisy tells us snobbishly (Daisy is nothing if not a snob) that they spend there time there doing "everything that a middle American with a good job and no idea of Europe would have done."
In the end, the unease is not maintained with the skill of Henry James. Things come to a head and appear to be resolved satisfactorily. Daisy tells us that the tale is a story of two madnesses and admits that the strangest thing of all was that she agreed to employ Margaret Pride "because I hated her on sight, and was ashamed of myself for doing so." Pride, the nanny, seems to have been seen off and life apparently returns to normal, if Daisy is a reliable narrator. I think the book might be a better one, if she isn't. Each reader will have to decide for themselves
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Quotations that struck me from the book
(1) While on the whole Candia McWilliam's writing is rather beautiful, she overdoes it on occasion, as when describing a dish of butterscotch instant whip as "a dish of quivering brown dancer's belly, its jewel a pitiless carmine cherry" or declaring that, "Like women, the Low Countries are used to invasion"
(2) I wasn't sure what the function of Daisy's Dutchness was, but possibly it was to allow McWilliam to make these two statements through her:
"The British, even the rich ones, drink envy with ice and a slice"
"In all flat lands, the sky is bigger."
(3) The story is partly an examination of how females interact. As Daisy remarks:
"Women all together could affect each other like small moons."
(4) On a practical level, if you read this novel, you will come away having learned (a) how to skin an eel and (b) how to eat a smoked eel, as well as (c) what to use to preserve wedding dresses:
(a) and (b): "To skin an eel, imagine taking down the socks of a soaked child, swiftly and mercifully. To eat a smoked eel as the Dutch did in my childhood, lift your head and swallow like a cormorant"
(c) "black, acid-free tissue paper".
(4) I cannot decide if this statement, made by Daisy, is profound or just the bleeding obvious:
"Fear is a very big thing, and there's a great variety of kinds."
Daisy is part-Dutch, a work-from-home editor (a job she isn't sure is worthwhile), the mother of a small boy called John and the wife of a frequently absent but very wealthy husband called Solomon, who remains shadowy and with whom she has what might be described most charitably as an old-fashioned relationship. The family live in a house in the country, looked after by a cook plus indoor servants and outside staff, (plus the nanny).
The family's cook is called Lizzie. In Daisy's description of Lizzie, we see some of Candia McWilliam's talent as a writer. Lizzie, we learn, "was sensible and knew children, having had several, She was not discontented with repetition, but comforted by it, so that her cooking and her conversation had a soothing constancy. She was free of any urban compulsion to entertain, so she was always interesting". Daisy explains that John liked to sit beside Lizzie "as she made stew".
"She was free of any urban compulsion to entertain, so she was always interesting" - I loved this sentence.
McWilliam also gives us pen portraits of two very long-serving maids. Edie "looked like someone who might have a singular, solitary talent - marquetry or the violin". Bet, on the other hand "in private was unimaginable; she was entirely public...a tub with tiny hands and feet; she always wore high heels...she loved pretty things and was violently maternal. 'Oh John' she shouted, 'Oh look at you, I could eat you on toast.' From most people he flinched, but he loved Bet. She bought him presents she could not afford, and often asked to take him home with her. To John too this was an unspeakably glamorous prospect...Her husband bred fancy guinea-pigs with whorls in their fur; sometimes she brought one for John to look at, in a box, in the back of her car." The boxes are "as a rule from the supermarket, having contained slightly substandard crisps, or imperfect pizzas. Bet knew where to get seconds of the already most inedible foods; her best connection in this way was the friend who got her unlabelled cans." "Could be giblets, could be niblets, they're not fussy, but I must say I would not eat those dirty pheasants", Bet declares.
Food is everywhere in the novel and appetite is its central preoccupation. While Bet is not judged for eating rubbish, at the very start Margaret's suitability is questioned by the much-loved departing nanny, who disapproves of giving a child sweets, as Margaret has done. Daisy also does not find sweet things appealing. She tells us that she loves, "fresh, clean food, pickled and salted to an alerting brackishness", adding that "for lunch, I had eaten approximately seventy black olives, of the type which is wrinkled and black as tar on a summer road...accompanied...with a jug of black coffee" (as her husband does not share her taste, she explains that she eats the things he likes in the evening while "most days I ate a plateful of something he disliked for lunch ... smoked roes or raw steak or the vinegar of capers. Sometimes I even managed to find the gelatinous pinkish herring, 'haring", of my Dutch childhood").
Margaret's food, as described by Daisy, stands in stark contrast to these things:
"Margaret loved sweet things and her shopping bags were full of those strange foods made for consumers addicted to bulk and sweetness but desirous of no nourishment. She bought those strange costly foods whose colours are of an unconvincing brightness. She drank chocolate milk so thick it resembled a bodily secretion, cheesecake which sighed to the knife. At the end of each day she calculated the value in calories of all she had eaten. The refrigerator in the nursery kitchen was full of bright drinks in clear vessels like aqualungs, and bread the colour of snow. For butter she had grease which reeked faintly of town water and her jam contained neither fruit nor sugar but was red as ric-rac. She did not seem to be aware that a lettuce and an omelette made from our own eggs would taste better and do her less harm than these weightless hefty meals of cloud and promise. In brown bags, John's food had its own place in the refrigerator, unseductive and plain. "
Again McWilliam's phrasemaking impresses me - I will never look at flavoured milk in the same way, since reading "chocolate milk so thick it resembled a bodily secretion."
Daisy points out that: "Our farm produced meat, the garden vegetables, we had milk and eggs and the cook made bread. I wondered sometimes whether these things were too physical for Margaret to bear."
Daisy describes herself as an "ex-beauty" and at one point tells us that she is "quirky" - (and as a narrator she definitely is - at one point, she suddenly breaks whatever the equivalent of the fourth wall is in fiction and, after stating, "I read much too quickly and want really only to read long simple stories with happy endings", asks the reader, "Can you think of any?"). Her job is solitary and as a result of this and being surrounded by staff:
"Sometimes I talked too much, not having spoken to anyone for a time. When I did talk to people, they were frequently the wrong ones...I was not often alone but I was never precisely more than accompanied."
Having done similar solitary work while living in diplomatic households with an Edwardian number of staff, I empathise with Daisy when she describes how she feels in her unusual role (especially the three words "useless but essential"):
"Inside our house women worked; in the garden men were employed. There were two women who cleaned, and one who cooked; there was Margaret and there was me. No two of us were equal, though I felt that it was not I who established the hierarchy. There was me, useless but essential, with the others below, each at her allotted, or, it may have been, chosen, level."
McWilliam's writing is full of insight, but what keeps one reading this novel is a dread that builds as it progresses, a dread centred on Margaret, with her apron that reads "Have you hugged someone today" and her twee way of speaking: "To listen to her was to hear language strangled at birth." The sense of mounting unease and vague menace is similar to that felt while reading Turn of the Screw by Henry James.
Daisy becomes pregnant - "Once you are pregnant, you have an unbreakable appointment to meet a stranger", she tells us, which is a rather a good perception, I think. Be that as it may, Margaret gains a more dominant position in John's life as the pregnancy progresses, even taking him to London without Daisy, where Daisy tells us snobbishly (Daisy is nothing if not a snob) that they spend there time there doing "everything that a middle American with a good job and no idea of Europe would have done."
In the end, the unease is not maintained with the skill of Henry James. Things come to a head and appear to be resolved satisfactorily. Daisy tells us that the tale is a story of two madnesses and admits that the strangest thing of all was that she agreed to employ Margaret Pride "because I hated her on sight, and was ashamed of myself for doing so." Pride, the nanny, seems to have been seen off and life apparently returns to normal, if Daisy is a reliable narrator. I think the book might be a better one, if she isn't. Each reader will have to decide for themselves
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Quotations that struck me from the book
(1) While on the whole Candia McWilliam's writing is rather beautiful, she overdoes it on occasion, as when describing a dish of butterscotch instant whip as "a dish of quivering brown dancer's belly, its jewel a pitiless carmine cherry" or declaring that, "Like women, the Low Countries are used to invasion"
(2) I wasn't sure what the function of Daisy's Dutchness was, but possibly it was to allow McWilliam to make these two statements through her:
"The British, even the rich ones, drink envy with ice and a slice"
"In all flat lands, the sky is bigger."
(3) The story is partly an examination of how females interact. As Daisy remarks:
"Women all together could affect each other like small moons."
(4) On a practical level, if you read this novel, you will come away having learned (a) how to skin an eel and (b) how to eat a smoked eel, as well as (c) what to use to preserve wedding dresses:
(a) and (b): "To skin an eel, imagine taking down the socks of a soaked child, swiftly and mercifully. To eat a smoked eel as the Dutch did in my childhood, lift your head and swallow like a cormorant"
(c) "black, acid-free tissue paper".
(4) I cannot decide if this statement, made by Daisy, is profound or just the bleeding obvious:
"Fear is a very big thing, and there's a great variety of kinds."
February 16, 2017
Beautiful, slightly haunting
July 24, 2021
Beautifully written deep dive into the psyche of her characters, Candia McWilliam has produced a hauntingly beautiful story on the perils of drifting through your life. I return to this book time and again and am never disappointed.
June 2, 2015
This book is presented as suspense but I've felt more suspense clipping my toenails.
January 29, 2018
Forget Lullaby, this is the original and it's far better.
September 30, 2022
Daisy has the sort of life in which people do things for her: there are cooks and gardeners, maids and drivers, people working in and out of the house. When her husband is away and she can't sleep, she can wander down hall after hall of unused guest bedrooms in search of a better night's sleep:
And so it is that Margaret comes into Daisy's life: Margaret, who is to take charge of Daisy's young son, to allow Daisy the time to write her letters and run her household—or have her household gently run for her, as the life she has fallen into is one in which other people, mostly, tell her what to do. Her husband likes to play the benevolent master (he jokes that when the revolution comes and his class, he will be happy to serve drinks—he is wrong and wouldn't have the slightest idea what to do in the real world, but at least he means well), and Daisy has a more interesting relationship with the household help than she might otherwise—one gets the sense that they think she's forgotten the real world too, and are prepared to pass on a bit of pity and wisdom as well as their paid work.
But then there's Margaret. Margaret, with whom Daisy cannot find fault but with whom she also cannot connect: it's something in Margaret's smell, perhaps, or in her polite remove...but Daisy can't fault Margaret's care for her son, or her wisdom about how to raise him, and so Margaret becomes more and more entrenched in their lives.
The whole book is in effect building to something, of course, and you're a savvier reader than I if you'd worked it out ahead of time. I made a couple of educated guesses, which were only partially correct, but mostly I find this fascinating for its undercurrent of class and classism and what we then do with class and classism. Really odd, overall, but intriguing nonetheless.
The White Room, in which long-married couples were put to sleep. The Yellow Room, in which happy lovers, long married, were put to sleep. The Pink Room, in which solipsists of either sex were put to sleep. The Dressing Room, in which tired belles or young bachelors were put to sleep. The Tulip Room, in which the truly tired were put to sleep. The Explorers' Room, in which the brave slept. (85)This was not the life she was born to—before marriage to the landed gentry (or similar), Daisy worked as an actress and a model, a waitress and a dishwasher, a nanny. Sometimes she worked with words, in London; now the only words that concern her are those in the letters she posts off to strangers she reads about, and her husband considers London too dirty, too rough, for her.
And so it is that Margaret comes into Daisy's life: Margaret, who is to take charge of Daisy's young son, to allow Daisy the time to write her letters and run her household—or have her household gently run for her, as the life she has fallen into is one in which other people, mostly, tell her what to do. Her husband likes to play the benevolent master (he jokes that when the revolution comes and his class, he will be happy to serve drinks—he is wrong and wouldn't have the slightest idea what to do in the real world, but at least he means well), and Daisy has a more interesting relationship with the household help than she might otherwise—one gets the sense that they think she's forgotten the real world too, and are prepared to pass on a bit of pity and wisdom as well as their paid work.
But then there's Margaret. Margaret, with whom Daisy cannot find fault but with whom she also cannot connect: it's something in Margaret's smell, perhaps, or in her polite remove...but Daisy can't fault Margaret's care for her son, or her wisdom about how to raise him, and so Margaret becomes more and more entrenched in their lives.
The whole book is in effect building to something, of course, and you're a savvier reader than I if you'd worked it out ahead of time. I made a couple of educated guesses, which were only partially correct, but mostly I find this fascinating for its undercurrent of class and classism and what we then do with class and classism. Really odd, overall, but intriguing nonetheless.
October 16, 2024
A slight story with first person narrator. As a privileged wife, Daisy doesn't seem to do much and has a nanny for her son along with other help in the house. As she gets bigger - pregnancy and secret over eating, she doesn't recognise Margaret's, the nanny, problems. Descriptions conjure up a languid mood and a beautiful home and the food Daisy consumes wouldn't look amiss in Dutch interior paintings (she is half Dutch). Ultimately a bit unsatisfying as the narrator is so passive.
December 20, 2018
Absolutely atrocious. I do not understand Nor do I like the writing style. It pains me to continue reading but I had to. I want to know the ending! I’m unable to relate to any of the characters mentioned, much less the stories behind each character.
November 21, 2018
I didn't really like this. Although brief, it was not all that easy to read due to the writing style which I found somewhat forced and jolting. The characters were cold, and the plot hard to fathom.
January 16, 2019
Een ogenschijnlijk onschuldig verhaal dat eindigt met een boulemiedrama.
March 22, 2019
Read my review here:
I registered a book at BookCrossing.com!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/2072204
I registered a book at BookCrossing.com!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/2072204
October 27, 2024
Not as good as A Case of Knives. Did enjoy all the obsessive discussion about food, though. Like reading a Nigella Lawson cookbook for pleasure.
November 13, 2011
When this book arrived I was quite excited to read it as it's a lot different from what I normally choose to read. A little stranger was a very fast paced read I think but entirely captivating throughout.
The characters throughout are well developed and I enjoyed getting to know them and their personality's. The descriptions used throughout were pretty awesome.
The arrival of a nanny for the son of Daisy and Solomon the efficient and capable Margaret Pride appears to be the perfect candidate. But as Daisy becomes increasingly removed from family life and the nanny becomes more prominent, oddities in Margaret’s behaviour soon surface. Daisy's existence is soon to become the nightmare of a woman who allows herself to be pushed to the limit, even when that means the loss of her home, her husband, her children and even her life.
Overall an intriguing novella, although it took me a while to get into the storyline to really understand what was going on, on some occasions have to re read parts a couple of times.
The characters throughout are well developed and I enjoyed getting to know them and their personality's. The descriptions used throughout were pretty awesome.
The arrival of a nanny for the son of Daisy and Solomon the efficient and capable Margaret Pride appears to be the perfect candidate. But as Daisy becomes increasingly removed from family life and the nanny becomes more prominent, oddities in Margaret’s behaviour soon surface. Daisy's existence is soon to become the nightmare of a woman who allows herself to be pushed to the limit, even when that means the loss of her home, her husband, her children and even her life.
Overall an intriguing novella, although it took me a while to get into the storyline to really understand what was going on, on some occasions have to re read parts a couple of times.
February 1, 2017
This book was definitely not my cup of tea. I disliked it so much, I was relieved that I only borrowed this from the Library. There was not built up of suspense, or for that matter any underlying point the author was trying to bring my attention towards. I did not like the reading experience I received from this book as a whole, hence the one-star rating. The one thing that stuck in my mind more than anything is this quote from the paragraph the author used to end her book:
"It is possible, without knowing it, to live at the margin of your own life. Life leaks away and you watch it go, a rope of water coiling down to nothing and the dark. It was my good luck that the tide came inshore and carried me past the shipwrecks and lost things of my former existence, and out once more into the day's eye and the loud resounding blue and white."
"It is possible, without knowing it, to live at the margin of your own life. Life leaks away and you watch it go, a rope of water coiling down to nothing and the dark. It was my good luck that the tide came inshore and carried me past the shipwrecks and lost things of my former existence, and out once more into the day's eye and the loud resounding blue and white."
January 21, 2014
Daisy is wealthy and pampered and mixed up. Margaret is organised, neat and deferential - seems to be a perfect choice of nanny to look after Daisy's young son, John. Affairs between master and nanny seem pretty standard in fiction but it's not long before we sense tensions of a higher order in this household. Exactly what secrets are both these women hiding? Probably the most unusual book about eating disorders I've read - and I've ploughed through dozens now. But I'm afraid the 'clever' literary stuff rather got in the way of the story for me. Sorry, heretical, I know!
January 14, 2017
Very distracting book. Not coherent enough.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews