Pianos and Flowers
Brief Encounters of the Romantic Kind
by Alexander McCall Smith
£12.99
- Hardback
- E-Book
229 in stock
Short stories
About the Book
In 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. What must have it like to be them? We hold our breath for them. Our heart beats faster for them. We look again at the photograph in a new light, and say Yes, it might have happened just like that.
This journey of exploration takes us to some exotic places. We share the lives of three sisters, brought up in Penang. We read of what happened to them, and to their Chinese neighbours caught in the tides of war. We see a group of small boys in a Glasgow slum, their young lives stunted by poverty, and hear how life worked out in contrasting ways for them. We follow a young woman’s search for love in the unlikely realm of Egyptian antiquities. And through all of these photographs, and all of these stories, there runs the same refrain: the possibilities of love, of friendship, of happiness lie before us.
There are big stories in these simple pictures. At first glance the photographs may seem unexceptional: the mere freezing of a moment in time. But delve deeper and you will realise that these photographs speak volumes.
The Author
Alexander McCall Smith
Alexander McCall Smith is the author of the highly successful No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, which has sold over twenty-five million copies. Since then he has devoted his time to the writing of fiction and has seen his various series of books translated into over forty-six languages and become bestsellers throughout the world. These include the 44 Scotland Street novels, first published as a serial novel in the Scotsman, the Isabel Dalhousie novels, the Von Igelfeld series and the Corduroy Mansions novels.Related
-
Paperback | Pub: 29 May 2008£7.99Sammar is a young Sudanese widow, working as an Arabic translator at a British university. Following the sudden death of her husband, and estranged from her young son, she drifts, grieving and isolated. Life takes a positive turn when she finds...
-
Paperback | Pub: 08 Jun 2017£8.99After more than thirty years in London, recently widowed Thomas Imbalil returns to India. He spends his first months in uncluttered isolation in his house overlooking the Arabian Sea, in a small village in Kerala. But when he agrees to look...
-
Paperback | Pub: 05 Apr 2018£7.99Morris Magellan is thirty-four years old and already two-thirds destroyed. By day he is an executive, after six and at weekends the husband of an understanding wife and the father of two. At all times he is a music lover and a drunk. Of the past he...
-
Paperback | Pub: 01 Sep 2017£8.99As a child Iain Crichton Smith was raised speaking Gaelic on the island of Lewis. At school in Stornoway he spoke English. Like many islanders before and since, his culture was divided: two languages and two histories entailing exile. His divided...
