Espresso Tales

Alexander McCall Smith bgan writing The Scotland Street  Series in 2004 as an episodic novel for The Scotsman newspaper. It chronicles the lives of the residents of a neighbourhood in the New Town in Edinburgh. I read the first in the series after staying in an apartment in the area. It was light and amusing and, because it was written as newspaper articles, was  broken up into easily digested chunks. It described a neighbourhood I knew well and mentioned many familiar streets, bars and shops.

Espresso Tales is the second book in the series and it picks up the story of Pat Mcgregor who is a student living at 44 Scotland Street with a cast of colourful neighbours while she tries to decide what to do with her life. She has a handsome, egocentric flatmate named Bruce who smells like cloves and is undergoing some setbacks in his romantic life and career. Domenica is an older anthropologist who offers words of wisdom to all and, in this installment, is preparing to set off to work on an anthropological study of modern day pirates. Stuart and Irene Pollock are not seeing eye-to-eye about what kind of upbringing to give their five-year-old gifted, saxophone playing son, Bertie. Artist Angus Lordie's beer swilling dog, Cyril, finally succumbs to his desire to bite someone's ankle. Again, I was delighted by their low-key believable antics and will move on to Book 3, Love Over Scotland, in a couple of months when I feel like I could use some light reading.