Author Archives: susan

I have some friends who are staying in a village house in Tuscany for ten days. I keep getting wonderful photos on WhatsApp (thank you, Trish Sharkey!) and I get the feeling they’ve strayed into a book or a film. … Continue reading →

The Correspondent had a queue of 53 eager library borrowers at the time I put it on reserve; it was the ‘sleeper hit novel’ of 2025 according to review I read on the Internet. A epistolary novel, no less – … Continue reading →

…in childhood, at three separate times, I died. It was not medical death in the way that it can now be defined. It was the opinion of doctors, humane men, around the bed of an organism under the rough ceiling … Continue reading →

I…lay listening to the mad, abandoned cries of flocks of pink-and-grey galahs that raved over me now and then, rolling and tumbling, revelling in their early-morning aerobatics. Some of them alighted briefly in the slender bare white arms of a … Continue reading →

(Crocus)…recall those miniature works of art created by the great Russian artificer Faberge in the luxurious days when the very rich could afford such extravagances… One wants to see them close to the eye, fully to appreciate the pencilling on … Continue reading →

I recently stumbled on Jon Appleton’s website when I searched ‘second golden age of children’s books’. It’s a celebration not just of writers, illustrators and books, but of publishers, editors, reviewers and commentators as well. At the time, I was … Continue reading →

The garden was a drug and I was hooked. I needed money to finance the habit. I began to understand completely why debtors resort to uncharacteristic, extreme crimes… Every penny spent was more than we could afford, and the knowledge … Continue reading →

Warning: A big old whinge ahead, so if you’d rather not read it, skip to the next paragraph. The world is awful. The weather is awful. My back hurts, and I have a toothache and a root canal to look … Continue reading →

Deep under the surface, a seam of coal has been burning for who knows how long. The colonists gave the mountain the banal name it goes by on the map (Burning Mountain), but it was burning long before they saw … Continue reading →

When the idea of writing a “literary memoir” first sprang up (from whom? Memory shrugs, but it was someone in publishing) I replied to her or him or them: “That would be tedious. You’ve heard the bad joke about the … Continue reading →