Last month’s edition of Writing Magazine (highly recommended by the way for all things writerly) featured Susanna Kearsley choosing her favourite books.
I’m a longtime fan of Susanna Kearsley’s books and have always read and reread Mary Stewart so I was thrilled.
Without giving it much thought, I fired off a letter. Opened the August edition, which arrived this morning, to find they’d printed it.
It’s great to get a letter printed in a magazine or newspaper but even better to get Mary’s books out to a wider audience. I’ve loved her books since I was about twelve and reread them often. As I get older, I get different things from them, surely the sign of great writing?
My favourites of hers are her early romantic suspense novels, often set in Greece. My Brother Michael made me desperate to visit Greece which I did. I still haven’t got to Delphi but it’s on the bucket list.
I cannot claim to be even a tiny fraction as good a writer as Mary Stewart but her writing has influenced me enormously. I favour the quietly heroic male characters featured so often in her romance books and the car chase in Tash’s Story owes a great deal to the incredibly tense one in Madam, Will You Talk?
And here I must put in a mention of Susanna Kearsley. I began with The Rose Garden and then went on to gobble up Mariana and many others. Hard to pick a favourite. It’s between The Shadowy Horses (fabulous – part ghost story, partly about archaeology) and Named of the Dragon (got to love a book set in Wales). She’s another writer who really needs to be known more.
When I began this blog, too many years ago to remember, I wrote an impassioned plea for a Mary Stewart book to be adapted as a TV series. Sadly, period drama is hugely expensive to make so it looks unlikely. But I live in hope! Here’s the link:
Love,
Georgia x
