SOURCE: Frame, Ronald. “Adventures in Prose.” Books and Bookmen, no. 356 (June 1985): 31.

In the following review of A Traveller's Room, Frame maintains that Davie's tales address the theme of communication between individuals.

[The] title story of Edinburgh writer Elspeth Davie's fourth collection, A Traveller's Room, concerns a teenage girl staying with her parents in a guest-house in a Perth of years ago. She is given the room of the absent ‘traveller’. She invents for him a life of drama, adventure and discovery. Then she begins to investigate his belongings: in a narrow drawer she finds two pairs of gloves, one for best and one for wearing. “They made me feel for the first time how vulnerably expressive hands were—sometimes confident and commanding, sometimes exhausted and hopeless.” She finds other things: “frail clothes”, and worn slippers “kneaded into the shape of knobbled toes”, and a book of recipes, “milky...