Alexander McCall Smith is one of the world’s best-loved and most prolific authors, applauded across the globe as the author of The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency and 44 Scotland Street amongst more than 100 other books. He lives in Edinburgh and many of his books are published on our Polygon imprint. He is hugely supportive of publishing in Scotland.
Reading a novel by Alexander McCall Smith feels as if a soothing balm is being applied to all the hurts and injuries inflicted by the world around us
– SMSA, Sydney
LATEST RELEASES
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Hardback | Pub: 15 Oct 2020£12.99£10.39What really counts in this life? For the writer, Alexander McCall Smith, it is friendship and love – themes that crop up time and again in his novels. And it is these themes that he explores in this collection of poems. In this book, divided into…
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Hardback | Pub: 05 Nov 2020£17.99£14.39At the bottom of a sharply descending street – in the topographical sense – in Edinburgh’s Georgian New Town, new residents have moved in to number 44 Scotland Street, joining the already well-known and much-loved denizens of that remarkable…
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Hardback | Pub: 13 Aug 2020£9.99Stories do not have to be long. In the space of a couple of sentences – or even a page or two – we may see the human heart exposed in a way that is more powerful than occurs in many much longer narratives. In Tiny Tales Alexander McCall Smith…
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Paperback | Pub: 11 Jun 2020£8.99Paul Stewart has returned to Scotland to continue his successful career. His agent and girlfriend, Gloria, has arranged for him to write The Philosophy of Food in Six Easy Chapters, a project he relishes but that will have to be delivered in six…
Stand Alone Fiction
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Hardback | Pub: 02 Nov 2017£14.99Val was working as a land girl when the Americans arrived at the nearby airfield in 1944. Mike, a young American airman, came into her life soon after, and so too did Peter Woodhouse, a dog badly treated on a neighbouring farm and taken in by her…
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Paperback | Pub: 08 Mar 2018£7.99It takes a lot to get under the skin of Cornelius ‘Fatty O’Leary, but then there is a lot of skin to get under. The heroically proportioned Fatty can normally take life as it comes. Right at home in easy-going Fayetteville, Arkansas, he…
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Paperback | Pub: 10 Aug 2017£7.99£6.39Imagine you’re on a train. Think about all the other people on the train with you, what their lives are or have been, and the different experiences you’ve all had. But there is one more thing that you undoubtedly all share: you have all…
SHORT STORIES and POETRY
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Paperback | Pub: 11 May 2017£7.99In this beguiling book, Alexander McCall Smith casts his eye over five chanced-upon photographs from the era of black-and-white photography and imagines the stories behind them. Who were those people, what were their stories, why are they smiling,…
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Hardback | Pub: 07 Nov 2019£12.99In Pianos and Flowers we are invited, through the medium of sepia images, to glimpse a world long departed. In these stories, inspired by long-lost photographs, the lives of the people in the frame are imagined and then explored, layer by layer….
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Paperback | Pub: 23 Apr 2020£9.99A poem does not have to be famous to be cherished. The best-known poems of Robert Burns have been loved by countless people over the years, but there are other poems that may be largely unknown that will mean a great deal to the few who are familiar…
Scotland Street
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Hardback | Pub: 16 Aug 2016£16.99Once more, we catch up with the delightful goings-on in the fictitious 44 Scotland Street from Alexander McCall Smith. With customary charm and deftness, Alexander McCall Smith gives us another installment in this popular series, now running in its…
CHILDREN’S FICTION
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Paperback | Pub: 13 Jul 2017£6.99Follow the exploits of the children who go to a most unusual school – the sail-powered training ship Tobermory. When a film crew arrives in Tobermory Bay, Ben and Fee are invited to be extras. But their suspicions are soon aroused – is…
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Paperback | Pub: 13 Jul 2017£6.99After successfully thwarting a dastardly plan to steal rare marine animals from the sea around the Scottish island of Mull, Ben and Fee MacTavish feel they can relax and continue learning all about nautical life on board School Ship Tobermory. But…
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Paperback | Pub: 05 Apr 2018£6.99Ben and Fee MacTavish and the rest of the School Ship Tobermory crew head down under to take part in a tall ships race, but after a good start the Tobermory runs aground after it drops out to rescue a local boy, Kimba, stranded on the rocks. When…
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Paperback | Pub: 08 Aug 2019£6.99Longlisted for the Highland Book Prize 2019 The School Ship Tobermory and its intrepid young crew are back in Hebridean waters. When a violent storm blows them off course to a remote island, they discover a fisherman’s journal written a hundred…
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Paperback | Pub: 23 Sep 2016£6.99Well before Precious Ramotswe founded her Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency, as an eight-year-old girl she was already solving mysteries. Here, in this delightful, new, enchanting tale for children, we see how the young Precious became the…
