Author: Susan Brice

  • The Gardener / The Cleaner of Chartres – Salley Vickers

    I went through a Salley Vickers phase some years ago and decided to pick a couple of the books up again recently. Looking online there are several more now to enjoy should I choose to go further and read her new writing. It is not surprising to find that Salley Vickers is a qualified psychoanalyst […]

  • TS Eliot

    Have just read a review of a new book about the letters of TS Eliot. This is published by Faber (of course!) and costs £60 so it won’t be finding a place on my bookshelves. Interestingly Eliot comments that he regards free verse as merely notes for a poem, particularly the work of DH Lawrence. […]

  • The Winter Ghosts – Kate Mosse

    If you have read Kate Mosse’s first bestseller Labyrinth which sold in its millions, and the subsequent books: Sepulchre and Citadel, you will be quite familiar with the author’s obsession with the Occitania, that region of south west France the goes down to Carcassonne, shares the mountainous border with Spain and has a language of […]

  • July 2025

    The advert on the wall of Marylebone tube station was indeed large and it pleased me immensely. It was advertising Tracy Chevalier’s latest novel ‘The Glassmaker’ and I understood it immediately. I knew the book had come out last year but now they were telling me it was available in paperback. I had been restrained, […]

  • The Art of Writing According to Stephen King

    ‘The road to hell is paved with adverbs,’ so says the bestselling author. Also, ‘If you’re describing what a character says, just write “he said,” … not “he pleaded” or “he gasped.” Well, I wonder how many lessons I taught on both these parts of English language. Also, disparaging description, his writing must be spare, […]

  • The Ghosts of Rome – Joseph O’Connor

    This was a birthday gift recently, in hard back. I had looked up when the paperback would be released and found that it wouldn’t be until next year, so, my patience ran out and I put it on my birthday list.  The Ghosts of Rome is the second in a trilogy called ‘The Rome Escape […]

  • Super!

    I very much enjoyed watching Wimbledon tennis a couple of weeks ago and inevitably I heard many interviews with the players. The rather facile questions that they are asked always include those about how they feel e.g. ‘how do you feel about playing on Centre Court?’ etc., etc. At that point I realised that there […]

  • Adam Dalgliesh – PD James

    Phyllis Dorothy James White is indeed an elegant writer of detective stories. I have dipped into her work before and enjoyed it, particularly the many stories about the police commander Adam Dalgliesh. The author conspires to make us immediately feel empathy for this character, and he writes poetry which definitely works for me. I decided […]

  • You Are Here – David Nicholls

    This is quite a quick and easy read but I don’t mean that in any critical way. It is a lovely book: charming, funny, witty and demonstrating the author’s ability to observe the everyday in minute detail. The novel is written in alternating perspectives from 2 middle-aged, divorced and lonely characters: Marnie and Michael. Extrovert […]

  • June 2025

    I can’t imagine there are many people reading this who aren’t familiar with the name Alexander McCall Smith. The jovial, super brainy professor of medical ethics at Edinburgh University who gave up the day job to become a full-time writer in the late 1990s. The confidence to take this very large step came from the […]