McCall Smith, Alexander "44 Scotland Street"

McCall Smith, Alexander "44 Scotland Street" - 2005

I have been a fan of Alexander McCall Smith ever since I read his first novel in "The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency". But he has written more series, so I thought why not try his novels on Scotland, his home country. After all, he has described Botswana so well, he should do just as great with his own nation.

It was interesting to read in the introduction, that this story was written in the same way Charles Dickens wrote his many great works, it's a serialised novel. The author had wondered why they didn't exist anymore and he had been taken up on this, so his novel appeared in snippets for six months in "The Scotsman".

The novel was as expected, funny and light-hearted, an easy read, nothing much happens but it doesn't get all that boring, either. The chapters are small, so they could fit into the newspaper, I suspect. I usually like my books a little more intriguing but this was quite nice.

From the back cover:

"Alexander McCall Smith's Scotland Street occupies a busy, bohemian corner of Edinburgh's New Town, where the old haute bourgeoisie finds itself having to rub shoulders with students, poets and portraitists. And number 44 has more than its fair share of the street's eccentrics and failures.

When Pat - on her second gap year and a source of some worry to her parents - is accepted as a new tenant at number 44, she isn't quite sure how long she'll last. Her flatmate Bruce, a rugby-playing chartered surveyor, is impossibly narcissistic, carelessly philandering and infuriatingly handsome. Downstairs lives the gloriously pretentious Irene, who precocious five-year-old is in therapy after setting fire to his father's copy of the Guardian. And then there is the shrewd, intellectual Domenica MacDonald, mysteriously employed but a sharp-eyed observer of the house's activities in her spare time...

Dry, funny, hugely entertaining, with its glittering cast of rogues, oddballs and innocents, McCall Smith's Scotland Street is proof that the author of The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency can be as witty, incisive and humane in observing his native Edinburgh as his adopted Botswana."