Will Alexander McCall Smith’s readers remain loyal now that he’s not writing about Bots- wana, which he sees as an earthly paradise, but about Edinburgh, which even her most devoted citizens couldn’t claim for her, beautiful though she is. He’s as amazed by that skyline as they are, but no one is more aware than he that it’s the people that make the city what it is. And here they are, warts and all, the ordinary and the extraordinary, the misfits and the prosperous, as they have already seen themselves in the pages of the Scotsman where this first appeared as a daily serial. In the book, that comes to 110 chapters with headings like, ‘The Rucksack of Guilt’ and ‘God Looks Down on Belgium’.
We tread this teeming city through the eyes of Pat, who’s on her way to see Bruce Anderson at 44 Scotland Street, hoping he will become her landlord.
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