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Title details for Tiny Tales by Alexander McCall Smith - Available

Tiny Tales

Stories of Romance, Ambition, Kindness, and Happiness

by Alexander McCall Smith
Iain McIntosh
ebook
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It is often said that the best things in life come in small packages; anyone in search of proof need look no further than the stories in this collection from the acclaimed author of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series: brief, utterly engaging tales that offer lasting surprise and delight, accompanied by charming illustrations by Iain McIntosh.
In Tiny Tales, Alexander McCall Smith explores romance, ambition, kindness, and happiness in thirty short stories accompanied by thirty witty cartoons designed by Iain McIntosh, McCall Smith’s longtime creative collaborator. Here we meet the first Australian pope, who hopes to finally find some peace and quiet back home in Perth; a psychotherapist turned motorcycle racetrack manager; and an aspiring opera singer who gets her unlikely break onstage. And, of course, we spend time in McCall Smith’s beloved Scotland, where we are introduced to progressive Vikings, a group of housemates with complex romantic entanglements, and a couple of globe-trotting dentists. These tales and illustrations depict the full scope of human experience and reveal the rich tapestry of life—painted in miniature.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    May 4, 2021

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

      • ISBN: 9780593316016

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9780593316016

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9780593316016
      • File size: 49686 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Booklist

      Starred review from April 15, 2021
      McCall Smith, internationally celebrated for his novels, especially the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, breaks new ground here with a collection of short stories spiked with some comics. The book is organized into thematic sections, including "Love," "Kindness," "Poignancy," and "Revenge," along with two especially whimsical sections: "Elevator Tales," about strange or serendipitous elevator encounters, and "Pope Ron," about the first Australian pope, who sports a tattoo of St. Francis of Assisi. McCall Smith's gift for quick characterization and his ability to conjure a range of moods, from philosophical to madcap, are on full display here. The best part of the book may be the sections titled "Amuse-Bouches." These are the graphic stories sprinkled throughout; artist Iain McIntosh, using heavy line drawings, illustrates McCall Smith's captions in panels that are sometimes zany-jokey, sometimes show sharp turns in fortune, and sometimes have an Aesop-like moral at the end. The "Amuse-Bouches" carry both serious and comic themes in groupings titled "Love," "Children and Their Parents," and "Life and Its Pitfalls" (with an incisive section called "Scientific Ethics: A Crash Course"). The graphic stories and the text-only ones all contain memorable characters, like a couple known as the "Virtue-Signallers," a Japanese passenger pusher, a contemporary Icarus on a hang glider, and a Russian cat with a face like Putin's. Quirky and delightful.

      COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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