Author: Susan Brice

  • Persephone Books

    A lovely bookshop that I haven’t visited! Before the pandemic and the lockdowns I was working out a bookshop walk in London. There was going to be time for a walk in the park and several vital stops for coffee and pastries and maybe even tea and cake. There were plenty of quite historic bookshops […]

  • The Marriage Portrait – Maggie O’ Farrell

    I did not immediately fall in love with this book, as I did with Hamnet, but it grew on me after a chapter or so. It is a great story and a rich read. It is indeed a portrait of a marriage but it is also a clearly painted picture of misogyny, control and female […]

  • Phone box libraries

    When I was in a tiny village in Somerset I saw a telephone box neatly shelved and full of books; a mini library. Looking this up I found there were many of them, using de-commissioned red telephone boxes. The first one was apparently opened in 2009 in Westbury sub-Mendip in Somerset and was purchased by […]

  • Still Life by Sarah Winman

    I stayed in bed this morning beyond what anyone would consider a respectable time on an ordinary Thursday in February, because I just had to finish the book I was reading. What a book! I urge you to buy, borrow or steal a copy. Well, ignore the last option but you get my drift. This […]

  • Hatchards

    The oldest bookshop in the country is in a tall, five storey building at 187 Piccadilly. Hatchards was opened by John Hatchard, a publisher and anti- slavery campaigner in 1797. It remains in the same building to this day and is an inviting place in which to browse. Age, heritage and time past are in […]

  • Love According to Will and Paul

    As it is February and of course St Valentine’s Day, I thought I would share my favourite Shakespearean sonnet with you: Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove: O, no! It is an ever-fixed […]

  • Cyrano de Bergerac – Geraldine McCaughrean

    A suitable story for Valentine’s Day maybe. I do understand that Geraldine McCaughrean did not originally pen this story. It was written in 1897 by Edmond Rostand completely in rhyming couplets. Since that time it has been reworked and rewritten countless times. It has been staged and filmed and pulled around for years. This edition […]

  • The British Library

    The British Library is a wonder. It contains the Magna Carta and handwritten lyrics of Beatles songs as well as everything else in between and it is free. As a child I remember it being part of the British Museum. I recall going there to see the Egyptian mummies and being bowled over by the […]

  • Lockdown finds

    Obviously in crazy lockdown times, particularly the first one (how many were there?) I had swathes of empty time, much of which was filled with extra reading and also following up writers on my iPad. Here are a few of the writers I encountered in that dark time. Somebody somewhere, maybe in a journal or […]

  • Lived Experience

    I read a newspaper article recently which was talking about the lived experience of writers. I wasn’t totally sure that I understood what they meant, so I read on. In essence it was saying that some publishers had been telling authors that unless they had lived through the subject matter of their novel, they should […]