Books
by Sue Gee
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Earth and Heaven |
After WW I, a young painter Walter Cox enrols at the Slade School under Henry Tonks and Wilson Steer; here he meets all the important people in his life, his wife Sarah, the alluring Nina, and the sculptor Euan who becomes his best friend. But it is Kent and its people including Walter's children which shape this atmospheric novel. So authentic are its characters and settings that I couldn't believe they were mostly fictional.
(Jenny Baker - bwl 22 February 2004) |
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Reading in Bed |
Books and the pleasures of reading link the lives of Dido and Georgia, both now sixty, friends since University. Neither envisages what lies in store. Dido will doubt her husband and suffer ill-health; Georgia must cope with widowhood and an eccentric country cousin suffering from dementia; both will worry about their children's love lives and for a time even their friendship will falter. Written with Gee's usual panache, sad, funny and ultimately uplifting.
(Jenny Baker - bwl 51 May 2009) |
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Reading in Bed |
Dido and Georgia, friends since university, return from a Book Fair - one to York the other to London - each laden with a pile of books. Sounds cosy? It isn't. Georgia is newly widowed, her only daughter searching for love, a distant cousin with dementia while Dido's life is falling apart with dizzy-turns, a husband she can no longer trust. Sounds grim? It isn't but it is all absorbing with living, breathing characters all conveyed in Gee's expressive prose.
(Jenny Baker - bwl 109 Summer 2023) |
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The Hours of the Night |
This is a thoughtful and intricate story of a year in the life of six people living on the Welsh border. At the centre is the young poet Gillian, a reclusive introvert. Other characters are renowned singer, Rowland; Edward his farmer partner; Nesta a gifted therapist and Phil, a young composer. If I had read this book in France it would have made me homesick for Great Britain, even for the mud and the rain.
(Sandra Lee - bwl 23 April 2004) |
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The Mysteries of Glass |
1860, winter, Darwin has recently unleashed The Origin of Species, a young curate arrives in a small town in Herefordshire. Idealistic but vulnerable and lonely, his love for a married woman and his discoveries of hidden cruelties and hypocrisies plunge him into a crisis of faith. Strong characters and a uncanny evocation of time and place kept me enthralled until the end.
(Jenny Baker - bwl 52 July 2009) |
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Thin Air |
William Harriman, retired, lives a comfortable if lonely existence in his Dulwich house. He runs an antique stall with Buffy, his late wife's best friend, and struggles to understand his prickly daughter and help his schizophrenic son. Then Janice Harper arrives as his lodger sent to get a life from Shropshire by his eccentric cousins who run a down-at-heel dog sanctuary and museum. She is the catalyst for change. An engrossing and thought provoking book.
(Jenny Baker - bwl 19 June 2003) |
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Trio |
1937, Northumberland, Steven a young history teacher, is mourning the loss of his wife, the bleak landscape a metaphor for his grief; redemption comes when he meets a trio of musicians and he experiences the healing power of music. Sue Gee's writing is itself like a piece of music, her characters live, breathe, suffer and love. Spanning two generations this is a novel with an undertow of sadness but one which is ultimately life affirming.
(Jenny Baker - bwl 95 Winter 2020) |
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