Susie Riddell
speaker
109 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 3 Aug
Susie Riddell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I am recommending Molly Keane's Loving and Giving.
which I love and I want to give it to you.
It's a brilliantly funny and devastating book.
It straddles the two world wars and it's set in a crumbling family estate in the final throes of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy.
The central character is Nicandra and she is actually named after her father's favourite horse, which kind of tells you quite a lot there about her parents.
And we first meet her age eight, then at 16, then in her 20s and 30s.
So you kind of go through her life.
When she's eight, her mother leaves home never to return.
That's not giving away too much because it happens quite early on.
And the effect of that loss is...
everything I think that happens to Nicandra after that.
The way she is unable to allow herself pleasure, really.
She denies herself constantly and making herself small rather than being an active character.
She's really quite passive.
I think it's a story of how complicated it is to be loved and to give love and the responsibility that parents have in giving love to their children.
And I just adore it.
I think it's brilliant.
Completely.
And what I love about Keane's writing is that she's able to be in the same sentence, hilarious and heartbreaking at the same time.
Seeing the world through Nicandra's eight-year-old eyes is devastating, isn't it?
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