SOURCE: Review of A Traveller's Room, by Elspeth Davie. Publishers Weekly 227, no. 25 (21 June 1985): 96.

In the following review of A Traveller's Room, the critic describes Davie's stories as brief tales that reveal a profundity beneath the superficies of commonplace lives.

These brief, laconic tales [in A Traveler's Room] reveal how extraordinary the commonplace can be, what profundities lie beneath the surface. In direct, clean prose, the author, delineating not her characters but the events that shape them, shows us in “A Botanist's Romance” a horticulturist so obsessed with Hamlet's Ophelia that he flees upon mention of a woman with the same name and, because he is convinced that she has drowned, throws flower petals into the river. “The Gift” tells of a headmaster's 50th birthday party, to which all the teachers save one bring presents, or so the head-master thinks, but he is wrong. “The Green Head” is that...