Author: Susan Brice

  • Long Island – Colm Toibin

    This is an author I really enjoy reading. There is also a really good BBC Imagine programme about him, should you care to look it up. This is a sequel to his book ‘Brooklyn’ which won many prizes when it was published in 2009, indeed it was long listed for the Booker. In Brooklyn, Eilis […]

  • Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close – Jonathan Safran Foer

    I don’t know, but I would guess that the pain of losing someone close to you is magnified if the death occurs in a huge, very public tragedy. I’m thinking the Boxing Day Tsunami or the Grenfell Tower fire. The other obvious example is the destruction of the Twin Towers in the 9/11 atrocity in […]

  • July 2024

    Little Clarendon Street in Oxford. If you are of a certain age this address might immediately bring to mind Laura Ashley! In the 1980s I would regularly walk along St Giles, out of the main shopping centre, to visit my favourite shop. It was a time of crowded communal changing rooms where you made sure […]

  • Shattered – Dick Francis

    I found this in a bookcase I rarely go to. It was a quick but enjoyable read. There are many examples of people becoming known in a particular field and then thinking they can use that fame to get published. The results are varied and the quality often questionable. However, Dick Francis is someone who […]

  • Clingy Words

    Matthew Parris in the Times wrote that some words have partners that they cling to. ‘Scantily’ is always followed by ‘clad’ … well, I think I agree with that. However, he goes on to say that ‘motley’ always goes with ‘crew.’ I’m not sure I’m with him there. I think I have spoken of a […]

  • Resurrection Men and A Question of Blood – Ian Rankin

    I have been trying to work out why I find these books so compulsive and satisfying. These two are numbers 13 and 14 in the whole sequence and I am only about half way through. If I hold onto my plan to ration myself, then I will still have new stories to enjoy for several […]

  • June 2024

    In 1984 bookmakers refused to take further bets on the winner of the Booker Prize. It was a forgone conclusion. The Empire of the Sun by JG Ballard would win … but it didn’t. The winner was a slim book of 140 pages: Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner. Accepting the prize, Anita Brookner said […]

  • The Copper Beech – Maeve Binchy

    I have written about today’s riches of Irish writers, some to my taste and others definitely not but Maeve Binchy was writing of a different Ireland, somewhat contemporary with Edna O’Brien. This is a country still under the iron control of the church when abortion is illegal but illegitimate babies are almost forbidden; women bearing […]

  • Penguin Books

    Oxford Brooke’s University holds the archive of Penguin books. It was fascinating to visit this and listen to the archivist talk about the history of the iconic and revolutionary publishing house. I already knew about the, possibly apocryphal, story of Allen Lane standing on a platform on Exeter Station and berating the lack of good […]

  • Keat’s House

    I have visited Keat’s House in Hampstead, London but I didn’t know there was a similar place by the Spanish Steps in the middle of Rome. A delightful small house, modestly elegant, at the base of the steps, hidden in plain sight. Apart from anything else, this little museum is an oasis of calm and […]