[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 of a young man whose hair was replaced by grass and flowers which, when he died, covered his grave perennially; “The Stamp” tells of another young man who, if he had neatly and squarely affixed the stamp on a letter to his lady friend, would have married her instead of her companion. Although the voice in all the stories is muted, it echoes with resounding clarity.