Author: Susan Brice

  • PG Wodehouse

    PG Wodehouse died 50 years ago today. I am at the moment watching a TV series with Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry as the perfect casting for the two characters but I also remember excellent dramatisations of the books broadcast on radio 4 long ago. Several times whilst teaching I successfully used the Wodehouse books […]

  • Being Taken Back

    Reading (and hugely enjoying) The Memory Library by Kate Storey, (see Readings) the books used within the narrative did indeed take me back. I was inspired to try Virginia Woolf again and I was directed to begin with Mrs Dalloway. I found it an enchanting read, almost a love song to London. It was published […]

  • My Fathers House – Joseph O’Connor

    The Sunday Times offered a review on a new book by Joseph O’Connor: The Ghosts of Rome and then Daunt’s bookshop advertised a talk with the author. I couldn’t go to that but I was interested enough to look it all up. My holiday to Florence and Rome last summer still gives me a heightened […]

  • Rivers in the Sky – Elif Shafak

    I finished reading this book a few weeks ago but I have hesitated about writing about it. It’s difficult to say why, maybe because the distance the novel covers is so huge that I don’t really know where to start. It is three stories in one and these are joined together by water. This book […]

  • The Road to Lichfield – Penelope Lively

    This was the author’s first adult novel, published in 1977 and it was shortlisted for the Booker prize, not a bad start, but of course she had already been very successful as a children’s writer. I have to say this is not my favourite of her books but I can certainly appreciate the skilled writing. […]

  • The Memory Library – Kate Storey

    I don’t always follow through when someone recommends a book to me, for the same reason that I don’t belong to a book group (much as I love talking about books); I don’t want to be told what to read. However, sometimes I do listen and read a book that has excited another reader. I’m […]

  • Killing Time – Alan Bennett

    I try hard to avoid heavy, expensive hardback books but a round, wooden table artfully styled with small, beautifully produced hardbacks, well, that’s another matter … and very hard to resist. Such a table was near the checkout in Daunts the other day and just as so many people would in indulge in chocolates as […]

  • January 2025

    The Booker Prize has been in existence since 1969. The hope was that newly published work would become as central to the English speaking world as the winners of the Prix Goncourt are to that of France. Publishers Graham C Greene and Tom Maschler came up with the original idea and then of course needed […]

  • Caledonian Road – Andrew O’Hagan

    I had read lots of glowing reviews of this book and planned to buy it when it came out in paperback. As it happened I received the hardback for Christmas, all 600 pages, not then a book to read in bed, fall asleep and drop on one’s face! That was not going to happen actually […]

  • Rewrites

    Just over a year ago I wrote in this column about originality and derivation, obviously particularly relating to books. A few days ago I read a Guardian article that looks at this subject from a slightly different angle. The appetite for Jane Austen seems to be insatiable. Several very good spin off books that I […]