Sarah Waters’s bestselling novel, The Paying Guests, is officially getting a TV adaptation, joining a long list of her novels adapted into movies and TV shows.
BBC Studios Fiction has optioned Sarah Waters’s 2014 novel about a 1922 love affair that spirals into a twisting crime thriller.
Killing Eve and In My Skin writer Kayleigh Llewellyn is attached to adapt it for television. No network or streamer has been confirmed yet, but given the material and the writer, that announcement will not be long in coming.
The last unadapted Sarah Waters novel is finally going to screen. Let’s talk about why this matters so much.
Who Is Sarah Waters?
If you have not yet read Sarah Waters, the most important thing to understand is that she is not simply a historical novelist, or a crime writer, or a literary writer. She is all three simultaneously, and she moves between those modes with a fluency that very few writers in any genre can match.
Sarah Waters published her debut novel, Tipping the Velvet, in 1998. It’s a Victorian coming-of-age story about a young woman who falls in love with a male impersonator and follows her to London. The novel won the Betty Trask Award and was immediately recognized as something genuinely new in British literary fiction.
What followed across the next two and a half decades is one of the most remarkable bodies of work in contemporary British literature. Affinity won the Somerset Maugham Award.
Fingersmith—a Victorian thriller of extraordinary complexity, about a young female pickpocket recruited to defraud a wealthy heiress—was shortlisted for both the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize, and later inspired Park Chan-wook’s Academy Award-winning film The Handmaiden.
The Night Watch was shortlisted for both the Orange Prize and the Man Booker. The Little Stranger was shortlisted for the Man Booker. She has been named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. She has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize three times.
What Is The Paying Guests About?
Set in post-First World War London in 1922, The Paying Guests begins as something that looks, on the surface, almost quiet. Frances Wray and her mother are genteel women in reduced circumstances. Their money is gone with the men of the family who died in the war, and they have been forced to take in lodgers to keep their house in Camberwell.
The lodgers who arrive are Lilian and Leonard Barber: a married couple, working-class and cheerful, who immediately disrupt the carefully maintained stillness of the Wray household. And then Frances and Lilian begin to notice each other.
The official description captures the arc of what follows:
Set in London in 1922, The Paying Guests follows Frances Wray and her mother as they take in married lodgers Lilian and Leonard Barber. What begins as a clandestine, intoxicating love affair between Frances and Lilian spirals into a twisting crime thriller, culminating in a brutal murder and a nail-biting court case.
The Sunday Times named it Fiction Book of the Year and described the novel as magnificently confirming Waters’ status as an unsurpassed recorder of vanished eras and hidden lives. It was shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Why Kayleigh Llewellyn Is Exactly Right?
The writer BBC Studios Fiction has chosen to adapt The Paying Guests is a pivotal one, as it speaks directly to what the material needs.
Kayleigh Llewellyn created In My Skin, the BBC Three series about a teenage girl navigating her mother’s drug addiction and chaotic home life while keeping it secret from her school friends. It is one of the most emotionally precise, tonally delicate shows BBC Wales has produced in recent years—a series that handles shame, desire, secrecy, and double life with exactly the kind of careful, non-exploitative intelligence that The Paying Guests demands.
She is also a writer on Killing Eve—which, whatever its later wobbles—and understood how to make female desire feel dangerous and funny and completely serious all at the same time.
Llewellyn is also currently writing The Dream Lands for BBC, meaning she is one of the most in-demand Welsh writers working in British television right now. The Paying Guests joins a BBC Studios Fiction slate that includes the upcoming third series of Jimmy McGovern’s Time, starring David Tennant.
Frances and Lilian Are Still Waiting For You; Go Meet Them!
The fact that The Paying Guests is being optioned now, in 2026, twelve years after publication, is nothing short of significant. The book didn’t need the adaptation to establish itself; it has done so steadily, on its own terms, since the day it came out.
What the adaptation offers is something different: the chance for the story of Frances and Lilian to reach the audience that has not found Waters yet. The people who know her name but have not opened one of her books. The people who will watch the series and then go immediately to the shelf.
If you are one of those people, if The Paying Guests is not yet a book you have read, the announcement of this adaptation is your invitation.
Go in knowing only that it begins as a quiet story about a woman taking in lodgers, and that it does not stay quiet. The rest will find you on its own.
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