Author: Susan Brice

  • The Muses – Kiran Millwood Hargrove

    When I really engage with a book I always want to find out about the writer (she lives in Oxford) and I want to see what else she has written; in this case not very much, one other novel and 2 books for young people. So, having read The Dance Tree, the ‘other’ book is […]

  • The Dance Tree – Kiran Millwood Hargrove

    The Dance Tree is one of the best books I have read in a long time and I would love you to read it too. The story is firmly grounded in history which I really like. In this case the setting is sixteenth century Germany; Alsace, sometimes German, sometimes French; in and around Strasbourg. The […]

  • June 2023

    As I walked through Marylebone tube station a large advertising poster caught my eye. A film starring Jim Broadbent and Penelope Wilton of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. (Have you noticed the fashion over the last 10 years for long titles of novels? Some much longer than this one.) I sat on the tube […]

  • Midnight Blue – Simone Van Der Vlugt

    A lovely story and a great read. I had never heard of this author and was interested to find out that she is a best selling writer in the Netherlands and that this is the first of her books to be translated into English. It is late in the seventeenth century in Northern Holland and […]

  • Fake Books

    Is it OK to buy books simply because of the cover, or the colour, size or design? Bookstagram and Booktok  (and probably many other social media sites that I don’t know of) are proffering books as interior decoration. In a way this is nothing new as many people bought books by the yard in Georgian […]

  • Louise Penney: Still Life and Fatal Grace

    I have been living a ‘small town life’ of late but very definitely that of a town in the US or Canada. There are of course plenty of small towns in England but they are never as remote as those on the other side of the Atlantic and that makes a difference; there is less […]

  • Comparatives and Superlatives

    I wonder where you stand on this? I had been doing some proofreading and wanted the word ‘youngest’ changed to ‘younger.’ If you have 2 sons, then as far as I’m concerned, you have a younger son and an elder son. To use the word youngest or eldest you would need more than 2 sons!  […]

  • Bloom’s Day

    Happy Bloom’s Day, 16th June. It might be fun to be in Dublin today, drinking Guinness and eating oysters as that seems to be the tradition. So all this is about the novel Ulysses written by James Joyce. I have only ever read the first part of this tome, similarly with ‘A portrait of the […]

  • Magical Realism

    I went to a good U3A literature session recently but probably even better was the chat on my journey home. The driver talked about the books of Elif Shafak with great interest and he used the term magical realism. It took me a moment to realise that he hadn’t made this up but that it […]

  • Who decides which books get reviewed?

    Getting your book reviewed is the best sort of advertisement. Even if the reviewer is not greatly enamoured by your work there is always the case of all publicity is good publicity. Publishers are familiar with literary agents and with editors and reviewers of magazines and newspapers. They are well practised in getting their product […]