Fingersmith

Sarah Waters's Fingersmith, published in 2002, is a crime novel set in Victorian-era Britain. Sue Trinder is an orphan who has been raised in a London house of petty thieves by Mrs Sucksby, who takes in unwanted babies, and by the pawnbroker Mr Ibbs. A well-dressed con man calling himself Richard Rivers, and known as Gentleman, brings Mrs Sucksby a scheme: Sue is to present herself as a maid to Maud Lilly, a wealthy young heiress living a sheltered life at Briar, her uncle Christopher Lilly's country house, and persuade her to elope with Gentleman. Once they are married he means to have Maud committed to a madhouse and take her fortune.

Sue agrees to the plan and goes to Briar, where she begins to pity and like the woman she has been sent to cheat. Maud, who was orphaned at birth, has been raised in near-seclusion and set to work by her uncle, and the arrangement around her is bound up with the property she stands to inherit. The novel gives parts of the account in Sue's voice and part of it in Maud's, and it belongs to the Victorian tradition in which asylums, doctors and inheritance law are the machinery that moves the plot.

Fingersmith was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and for the Man Booker Prize, and won the CWA Historical Dagger for historical crime fiction. It has been adapted for television, for the stage and as a film.