Author: Susan Brice

  • French Folds

    I feel I must have written about this before but it appears not. I like French folds, they add gravitas and style to what would otherwise be an ordinary paperback. A French fold is a continuation of the book cover that folds inwards and thus can be used as a bookmark. It also allows artwork […]

  • Walk the Blue Fields – Claire Keegan

    There are modern Irish writers that I greatly admire, particularly Colm Toibin and Claire Keegan, but oh my goodness the melancholy that is involved. I realise that the last 150 years of Irish history is extremely fertile land to be harvested by any writer and the enormous power and influence of the Roman Catholic Church […]

  • March 2026

    The Strike Novels – Robert Galbraith I feel I should have bookish indigestion having just read the first four Strike novels in very quick succession. However, I don’t. Instead, I feel replete, a very full, satisfied feeling as though I had just eaten an excellent meal. That surely must be the sign of some great […]

  • The Housemaid – Freida McFadden

    I picked up this book out of sheer curiosity. There are masses of these paperbacks and they are everywhere, from Daunts and Waterstones to Sainsburys. They nearly fill the best seller lists that appear every week in the Sunday Times. Do note these are the bestseller lists, not necessarily lists of the best books! I […]

  • Conundrum – Jan Morris

    Well, this slim book is well named. For the vast majority of us it is indeed a conundrum to feel so very strongly that you were born into the wrong body that you are prepared to undergo lengthy, risky and painful surgery to become a member of the opposite sex. Jan Morris was born James […]

  • Homemade God – Rachel Joyce

    I haven’t read any Rachel Joyce for a while. A few years ago I did enjoy The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (and the subsequent film) followed by Maureen Fry and The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy. Quite a moving trilogy. In Homemade God we are faraway from Harold’s genteel suburbia, instead transported to […]

  • The Artist – Lucy Steeds

    I have had a couple of months where I have been deeply immersed in detective fiction of one sort or another: Ian Rankin, Mick Herron, Robert Galbraith, just for starters. I needed an antidote … and then it was Valentines Day. My gift was a debut novel by Lucy Steeds; The Artist. A perfect present […]

  • Troubled Blood – Robert Galbraith / Death At The Sign Of The Rook – Kate Atkinson

    How many pages can you read whilst a saucepan of peas cooks do you think? As it turns out, quite a few. I know as I have done it. Usually my current book stays beside my bed, except during lockdown times when there was a downstairs book and an upstairs book. However, I lived (I […]

  • February 2026

    The Strike Novels: Robert Galbraith I feel I should have bookish indigestion having just read the first four Strike novels in very quick succession. However, I don’t. Instead, I feel replete, a very full, satisfied feeling as though I had just eaten an excellent meal. That surely must be the sign of some great writing. […]

  • The Lord of the Flies – William Golding

    Maybe it depends upon whether you are an optimist or a pessimist as to whether you follow RM Ballantyne’s portrayal in ‘The Coral Island’ of children castaway on a tropical island, not only surviving but thriving or the anarchic picture in William Golding’s ‘The Lord of the flies’ of lost boys becoming tribal and murderous. […]