Balfour, Sandy. Pretty girl in crimson rose (8): a memoir of love, exile and crosswords. London: Atlantic Books, 2003. ISBN 1-84354-089-4.

Summary: A peripatetic journalist, a native of South Africa who emigrated before the apartheid regime fell, recounts some episodes from his early adulthood, interspersed with anecdotal descriptions of how British-style crosswords work and what the people who construct them are like. The connection is that the author loves crosswords and sees them as a way for repressed people to make human contact; the remoteness and arbitrariness of the contrived wordplay provides a rich field for subtle symbolism and indirect communication.