Author: Susan Brice

  • Lessons – Ian McEwan

    It took me some time to get into this lengthy book. The ‘lessons’ of the title are the lessons of life, in particular those of the main character, Roland. We follow his years from a small child through to old age. He has a family story which he grows up thinking is simple and straightforward […]

  • One Afternoon – Sian James

    This is a gentle book and an almost perfect one. I suppose it focuses on the extraordinary goings on of very ordinary people. The main character, Anna, tells her own story of being widowed early and left to bring up 3 small girls. Far too quickly, Charlie (from an earlier life) bursts into their home […]

  • October 2023

    I came to Ian Rankin late, even though I had known the name and his reputation for a long time. So there are now 24 books about his detective John Rebus. I started at the beginning as I like to do and have now just read book number 8: ‘Black and Blue.’ Rebus lives and […]

  • Merchant of Venice 1936

    I saw a production of this play recently at my local theatre. It was unusual in that Shylock was played by a woman and the setting was Cable Street in the East End of London in 1936, the time of fascism, Moseley and the Black Shirts. Actually nothing was very usual about the matinee I […]

  • Concord

    I was in Boston a few days ago and one day we travelled by train to Concord, a pretty small town about half an hour from the city. The purpose of the visit was to go to Orchard House, the home of Louisa May Alcott, she of Little Women fame. Her books were hugely important […]

  • I could have been a lexicologist

    I have enjoyed my teaching career but I might have also enjoyed other ways of earning a living. Careers advice at my school was abysmal. Nursing and the police force were represented I remember … and, well, very little else. I might have been happy working in publishing. I still don’t entirely understand all the […]

  • Fitzcarraldo

    This is not a name with which I was familiar until a couple of weeks ago. Since then I have read about it in several publications. Fitzcarraldo is the name of a small, independent publishing house that is creating a lot of surprise in the industry. Jacques Testard is the one with the vision and […]

  • Public Garden Library in Boston

    I won’t post anymore of these but I am delighted to find them in so many places, used and not vandalised. Cheering … and full of that nice word community.

  • Sitting or Sat?

    I remember listening in the staff room to somebody who said: ‘And there they were, all sat at their desks ready for the lesson.’  This sounded quite foreign to me and not something I would ever have said. My version would have replaced ‘sat’ with ‘sitting.’ ‘ He was sat at the front,’ sounds even […]

  • The Lost Bookshop – Evie Woods

    You know when Amazon says: we think you’d like this one! Well, sometimes I ignore and refrain and well, other times I press the button. Evie Woods is an Irish writer of whom I had never heard but I think I was particularly vulnerable to anything with ‘bookshop’ in the title. This is full on […]