Author: Susan Brice

  • The Lace Jacket

    A lady I met on an art course at Missenden Abbey had brought in a very old lace jacket. It was exquisite. She really didn’t know anything about its history and over coffee we made up a few possible scenarios. I said that the jacket deserved a story and I would write one and send […]

  • Bookish – Lucy Mangan

    If you have ever used books as an escape or if you have ever put reading above other commitments, then you will find it easy to commune with this author who is writing about how reading shapes our lives. This is a follow up book to ‘Bookworm.’ The idea is the same and it’s fun. […]

  • Oxford Literary Festival

    The Oxford Literary Festival is a wondrous thing, maybe a little like Hay but no tents, mud or wellies. Instead you find yourself in the beautiful Sheldonian theatre, the Divinity School with its amazing ceiling or various historic halls or churches. 2 events that I fancied were on consecutively so that made for an excellent, […]

  • Gilead – Marilynne Robinson

    This book had been at the edges of my reading mind for a long time. Eventually I have read it. Gilead is a real place, a mountainous area in Palestine and it is an imagined small town in Iowa, USA. Iowa is in the mid-west. It is a flyover state i.e. tourists fly from the […]

  • March 2025

    Near the top of one of the floor to ceiling bookshelves in my bedroom is the Penelope Lively section. These shelves will always remind me of lockdown times when I was compulsively buying books and then manically reading them. The piles on my bedside table…and on the floor…became impossibly vertiginous and soon two tall bookcases […]

  • The Tabernacle

    I have just spent an evening at the Tabernacle in the depths of Notting Hill. The Tabernacle is a disused church which has been repurposed as a community centre and I was there for a session of 5×15. This is an organisation that gets together 5 interesting people who are given 15 minutes to talk […]

  • Book Talk

    Daunts bookshop in Marylebone is always a joy but to visit in an evening for a talk by an author just adds to the pleasure.  The author was Harriet Walter and she was being interviewed by the historian and biographer Lucy Hughes-Hallett. I often wonder what writers think of their agents and publishers demanding that […]

  • The Wager and the Bear – John Ironmonger

    I didn’t mean to go book shopping. Writing that reminds me of the Arthur Ransome title: ‘We didn’t mean to go to sea.’ But, anyway, there I was in Blackwells in Oxford and I knew I wouldn’t leave without some new reading. I bargained with myself…well, if you’re going to buy, then make it something […]

  • February 2025

    Looking for something different to read, I walked along my bookshelves and came across these two. They took me back to my teaching days. For several years I ran a lunch time reading group for able readers in year 6, so 10 and 11 year olds. We read a chapter of a book and discussed […]

  • Done

    That is it. I am done with Hardy … Thomas that is. I was tempted back to my teenage enjoyment of the Hardy novels by loving the writing of David Nicholls. And, as had been said before, he is consumed by this late Victorian writer. I was looking up the ‘Tess’ quote that Nicholls uses […]