As she sits in her Bloomsbury home in 1933, assisted by her enigmatic maid Sarah, elderly Harriet Baxter sets out to relate the story of her acquaintance, over four decades previously, with Ned Gillespie, a talented artist who never achieved the fame that she maintains he deserved.

After a chance encounter, she befriends the Gillespie family - wife Annie, daughters Sybil and Rose and mother Elspeth - and soon becomes a fixture in all of their lives.

"[3] Kirkus Reviews concludes "Harris writes sensitively and in rich detail, whether conjuring up a Glaswegian streetscape or the elements of one of Ned’s compositions.

If The Observations drew on Gothic romance and sensation fiction for its inspiration, Gillespie and I follows the tradition of Henry James, using the first-person narrator to explore questions of consciousness and perception.

[5] Carol Birch in The Independent writes, "Harris plays with the reader's expectations and perspectives brilliantly...Multi-layered, dotted with dry black humour and underpinned by a haunting sense of loneliness, this skilfully plotted psychological mystery leaves a few threads dangling, all of them leading back to an old woman living in London in 1933 with two greenfinches in a cage and a mysterious servant/companion called Sarah Whittle, of whom she is afraid.

"[7] Anthony Cummins in The Daily Telegraph is less enamoured though: "in order to succeed, Gillespie and I must eke suspense from the nagging accumulation of discrepancies that slowly oblige you to view the narrator not as a good Samaritan but as a needy busybody.