Howard’s End is on the Landing by Susan Hill

The ultimate comfort read: as Susan Hill browses among the books on her shelves, she reflects on reading and the authors she has met.

A short, cosy, easy-read for booklovers.

In this warm and gentle love-letter to reading, Susan Hill spends a year rediscovering the books on her shelves, instead of buying new ones. Old favourites are found. Notes and letters and receipts slip from pages, prompting memories. It rains, and she sinks into enormous volumes.

Along the way, she reflects on fonts, book titles, short stories, marginalia, and slow reading. She shares anecdotes of authors she has met: Edith Sitwell, Roald Dahl, Bruce Chatwin, and Alan Clark, among others. But most of all, she revels in the books themselves, holding favourite writers up to the light and admiring how they shine: Barbara Pym, Dickens, Auden, Penelope Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, W.G. Sebald, Elizabeth Bowen . . . It’s a largely British stable.

Seasons pass. Blue crocuses flower in the garden. She reads on the floor in the sun, as the light crosses and fades from the room.

I have two of Susan Hill’s books at home: I’m the King of the Castle and The Various Haunts of Men. One is shelved between Colm Tóibín and Patricia Highsmith; the other between Helen MacInnes and Ernest Hemingway. I wonder what she’d think of that.

Although Susan Hill champions slow reading, I devoured Howard’s End is on the Landing in two days. It’s a cosy-blanket of a book, and has inspired me to look for a copy of Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris and Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower.

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