B. Morrison's Blog

Rain, by Melissa Harrison

While rainy weather sends most people indoors, Harrison suggests that “if you only ever go out on sunny days you only see half the picture, and remain somehow untested and callow.”

In this quiet gem of a book, she takes us on four walks in the rain in different parts of England. In January we visit Wicken Fen in Cambridgeshire; Shropshire in April; the Darent Valley in Kent in August; and Devon’s Dartmoor in October. Different landscapes, different seasons, yet all of them reveal how our worl...

The Child from the Sea, by Elizabeth Goudge

Little is known of Lucy Walter whose son James was the oldest child of King Charles II. From those few facts, Goudge has spun an entrancing story of a vibrant girl whose great love for the prince—whose father ruled England, Scotland and Ireland as King Charles I—lasted a lifetime. We first meet Lucy as a child in Wales, where she lived with her family in Roch Castle and thought herself part buccaneer, roaming the countryside experiencing all of creation with a dazzling joy.

It was then she...

A Piece of Justice, by Jill Paton Walsh

Imogen Quy is a nurse at St. Agatha’s College in Cambridge University. Working part-time gives her the freedom to enjoy other activities like quilting, which is where the story begins. She and two friends must choose a pattern and fabric for a quilt that will eventually be raffled off for the Red Cross funds. This seemingly unimportant activity foreshadows what’s coming in this smart mystery.

The three have different ideas for a quilt pattern: one wants something simple and basic while an...

The Incredible Crime, by Lois Austen-Leigh

This has been my month for virtual travel: from a remote Finnish island to southern Virginia to Tuscany and London. Now this recently republished novel from 1931 takes me to East Anglia, a part of England I love, where we move between Cambridge and a manor in Suffolk.

Prudence Pinsent, a thoroughly modern woman in her thirties, lives with her father, the Master of (fictional) Prince’s College and a retired bishop. In her role as his hostess she’s perfectly proper but “she reserved to hers...

Still Life, by Sarah Winman

Tuscany, August, 1944. Taking a walk after lunch, Evelyn Skinner sees a jeep and waves it down. As an art historian with decades of experience, she’s in Italy to help with the artworks from museums and churches that have been hidden in the hills during the war, identifying them and assessing the damage. She asks the young English soldier driving the jeep, Private Ulysses Temper, to help her contact the Allied Military Government.

Even in this brief scene, these two people capture the imaginat...

Gemma Sommerset, by Jill McCroskey Coupe

The story opens at a summer camp in the Blue Ridge mountains where fourteen-year-old  Gemma undergoes a transformative experience. In 1957 girls’ roles were strictly defined, especially in the South, but away from home and facing a surprising danger, she finds a new sense of herself. The problem then becomes what to do with that when she returns home.

Gemma is part of an in-between age group: too late to be part of the WWII generation and too soon for the Sixties with its peace-and-love. This...

The Summer Book, by Tove Jansson

The twenty-two chapters that make up this brief novel combine surprisingly poignant discussions between two women, one very young and one very old, with closely observed details of the natural world. The girl and her grandmother spend their summers together on a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland, while Papa is also somewhere about, working. Jansson, author of the Moomintroll comic strip and books, apparently based much of it on her own summers on a similar island.

Early on, six-year-old Soph...

Beryl Blue, Time Cop, by Janet Raye Stevens

Librarians! I admire them all. They know so much and are incredibly generous. So when I met a librarian who’d written a suspense story about a time-traveling librarian, how could I resist?

Beryl Blue, librarian-in-training, is going about her business one day in 2015—her business at that moment being shelving books—when she falls off a ladder and into an adventure. Caught by the mysterious Glo Reid who materializes from 2031, Beryl is given a mission to go back to 1943, where World War II...

Clear, by Carys Davies

In 1840s Scotland, John Ferguson makes the difficult decision to become one of the evangelical ministers leaving the Church of Scotland to help form the Free Church of Scotland. It means giving up his job and income, but at least his church will be free of patronage and interference from the British Government. Also, it’s not the life he’d promised his wife Mary, but she accepts his choice.

 

The other major political upheaval besides the Disruption of the Church of Scotland is the ongoing Hi...

The Strand Magazine, Issue LXXV 2025

A new story by Graham Greene? And a new one from Ian Fleming, too? Wow! I had to send for this issue.

Greene’s story is a departure from his usual explorations of moral ambiguity in the worlds of diplomats and spies, which he knew from having been recruited by MI6, as well as the Catholic faith and imperialism. “Reading at Night” is an entertainment indeed: a ghost” story, reminiscent of classic British ghost stories such as those described in Ghostland, by Edward Parnell.

A man who is...