Sue Gee

The Mysteries of Glass

Earth and Heaven

Opening at the Hay Festival, and ending with the prospect of a spring wedding, Sue Gee's novel is a lively story of tangled relationships and the sustaining powers of good books, loyal friends and conversation. Friends since university, with busy working lives behind them, Dido and Georgia have long been looking forward to carefree days of books and conversation, when each finds herself caught up in unexpected domestic drama. Dido, for the first time, has cause to question her marriage; widowed Georgia feels certain her husband will return to her. Meanwhile, an eccentric country cousin goes wildly off the rails, children are unhappy in love, and perfect health is all at once in question.

Reading in Bed

This is the first short story collection from an acclaimed novelist with a wide and loyal readership. Many of the stories have won prizes, been published or broadcast; some are new, written especially for the collection.Several feature artists, and are set in the past in a rural England; others are contemporary: stories set in London or Europe, of love glimpsed, lost, or longed for. ‘In Bratislava’ is the brief encounter between a lonely businessman and young student in the aftermath of communism. Two or three look at illness and mortality: in ‘Last Fling', the title story, a dying woman places a lonely hearts ad.All these stories are written with Sue Gee's insight, precision and delicacy of style and tone. Her last novel, Reading in Bed (2007) was a Daily Mail Book Club Selection; her next will be published in 2012. Poignant and haunting, immensely readable, Last Fling is the perfect book between the two.

Last Fling

William Harriman, a retired civil servant, is a cultivated and kindly person in his late seventies, who has lost the two people most dear to him: his wife, Eve, now dead, and his son, Matthew, who is mentally unstable following an earlier breakdown. Even his relationship with his daughter Claire is not a good one. William's one joy in life is running an antique stall with Buffy Henderson, an old friend of Eve's. His other relations, however, are very different. They inhabit the Dog Museum in Shropshire - a decaying family home in whose grounds they house vast numbers of stray dogs and dog memorabilia. Linking these two worlds - the one urbane, settled, shot with loneliness, the other distinctly cracked - is Janice Harper who, restless with country life and walking dogs for the Harrimans, comes to London for some excitement...

Thin Air

In the aftermath of the First World War, the painter Walter Cox cherishes the place of his childhood to keep the pulse of his art alive. Haunted by his work, his young daughter Meredith has her own fight: to quell the power of her inner life. Deeply affecting, shot through with a shimmering apprehension of the natural world, EARTH AND HEAVEN is about life's fragility, and the power of love and painting to disturb, renew and reveal us to ourselves.

Author Sue Gee explores the wellspring of creativity and practice of twelve prominent but various writers, including Penelope Lively and Anna Burns.

Encounters with Twelve Writers

Just You and the Page

Northumberland: the winter of 1937. In a remote moorland cottage, Steven Coulter, a young history teacher, is filled with sadness and longing at the death of his wife. Through a charismatic colleague, Frank Embleton, and Frank's sister, Diana, he is drawn into the beguiling world of a group of musicians, and falls gradually under their spell. But as war approaches a decision is made which calls all their lives quite shockingly into question.Moving between the beauty and isolation of the moors, a hill-town school and a graceful old country house, Trio delicately explores conscience and idealism, romantic love and most painful desire. Throughout it all, the power of music to disturb, uplift and affirm is unforgettably evoked.

Trio

John Wyndham

David Strorm's father doesn't approve of Angus Morton's unusually large horses. Little does he realize that his own son, his niece Rosalind and their friends, have their own secret aberration which would label them as mutants. But as David and Rosalind grow older it becomes more difficult to conceal their differences from the village elders.

The Chrysalids

It's the winter of 1860 when Richard Allen, a young curate, travels to a small hamlet outside Hereford to take up his first position. It's in this quiet place of wind and trees, birds and water that Richard is to fall passionately in love - but he cannot find fulfilment, for his lover is Susannah Beddoes, the wife of the vicar of his new parish. As Richard's feelings challenge him to his core, he develops a strange relationship with another woman, the solitary and eccentric Edith Clare. Against the backdrop of immense social and industrial change, the consequences of Richard and Susannah's affair are dramatic as they - as well as Oliver Beddoes - grapple with doubt and what it means to lose faith when the great certainties are in question. And throughout it all, the crossing-keeper's daughter Alice Birley - an observer of incidents and events she does not fully understand - has her own part to play...

A magnificent reconstruction of Poland and her people from the Second World War to Solidarity From the streets of Nazi-occupied Warsaw, through the lonely dreams of a little Polish boy growing up in Clapham in the fifties, to a candlelit vigil for Solidarity outside London’s Polish Embassy – this is the tragic story of Poland seen through the fortunes of a single family. Jan and Anna Prawicki survived Hitler’s devastation of Warsaw, and fled, haunted by the past, to England. Through their own struggles, the memories of their parents and the developing lives and loves of their children, Jerzy and Ewa, we enter the terrors of war, occupation, repression and resistance, as individuals and a nation struggle for life and liberty. ‘... embraces the experience of two generations of Poles . . . An alluring subject, skilfully constructed’ Daily Telegraph

Spring Will Be Ours

Keeping Secrets is the absorbing story of two very different sisters: of their complex relationships with each other, with the men they love, and with their children. Hilda is clever, purposeful, self contained, a woman whose ordered life is focused on her teaching career, who lives alone and who, until she meets Stephen, a married man, has successfully kept emotion at a distance. In contrast, her younger sister Alice is someone whose feelings have always threatened to overwhelm her. She has always felt in Hilda’s shadow, and her uncertainty and insecurity have receded only with the love of her husband, Tony, and the birth of her children. When she discovers that Hilda has decided to have Stephen’s child she feels her territory is being invaded, and all her anxieties resurface. But as the birth of her baby draws near, Hilda’s own problems emerge. She comes to realise that there are limits to her self-sufficiency, and that her relationship with Stephen is not as perfect as she had though. Meanwhile, Stephen’s wife Miriam, physically and emotionally isolated at their house in Norfolk, has kept her own secrets, and made her own discoveries. As the hot summer wears on, the lives of all three women come to a turning point, with a climax which none of them has envisaged. From the author of Spring Will Be Ours, this poignant novel explores the dilemma of the single woman who longs to have a child, and finds no easy solutions.

Keeping Secrets

Gillian Traherne and her mother Phoebe lead a remote existence in their grey, stone house on the Welsh borders. Gillian is a loner, an eccentric poet in her thirties, who has a difficult relationship with her very different mother: a well-known and expert gardener. Into their strange and secluded world, described with beautifully observed detail, come strangers from London to disrupt life as Gillian knows it. But with the joy of the love that she is to discover, will also come the pain and suffering of experience and the stark realities of the adult world.

Sue Gee

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