Susan Hill will never support e-books, they don’t inhabit your home, they don’t lurk, their smell will give you no Proustian moments and - hard to imagine ever running your finger down your e-book index with quite the same enjoyment and opportunity for happenstance as you find on a crowded book shelf. Her delightful book is a journey through her book shelves and each book, read or unread conjures up memories, a record of a year of reading and rereading only the books to hand and not buying more.

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Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman

Synopsis

This is a year of reading from home, by one of Britain's most distinguished authors. Early one autumn afternoon in pursuit of an elusive book on her shelves, Susan Hill encountered dozens of others that she had never read, or forgotten she owned, or wanted to read for a second time. The discovery inspired her to embark on a year-long voyage through her books, forsaking new purchases in order to get to know her own collection again. A book which is left on a shelf for a decade is a dead thing, but it is also a chrysalis, packed with the potential to burst into new life. Wandering through her house that day, Hill's eyes were opened to how much of that life was stored in her home, neglected for years. Howard's End is on the Landing charts the journey of one of the nation's most accomplished authors as she revisits the conversations, libraries and bookshelves of the past that have informed a lifetime of reading and writing.

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About the Author

Susan Hill has won both the Whitbread and Somerset Maugham Awards and been shortlisted for the Booker. She is the subject of one of the Vintage Living Texts. She runs her own publishing business, Longbarn Books, and edited the literary magazine, Books and Company. Her novels are set for GCSE and A Level, and her play, The Woman in Black, has been running in London's West End for 15 years.   In 2011 Susan Hill was shortlisted for the CWA Dagger in the Library, awarded to an author for a body of work. More books by this author Author 'Like for Like' recommendation