In this warm, intelligently observed novella, Isabel Dalhousie, Alexander McCall Smith's wonderful heroine, learns valuable lessons about inviting the past (and everyone in it) back into your life.Isabel Dalhousie--philosopher, mother and friend--has generously agreed to host the opening dinner for her school reunion weekend. Twenty-five former classmates will descend upon her Edinburgh home, bringing with them new names new looks, and old reputations. While some s...

No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency author Alexander McCall Smith also writes the hugely popular Isabel Dalhousie mysteries. A favorite novella in that series, "At the Reunion Buffet" showcases Isabel's grit and grace as a friend-and dinner host. Inviting 25 former classmates to a reunion dinner, Isabel sees an opportunity to finally resolve age-old differences among her classmates. But when damaging secrets and long-held resentments surface, Isabel finds the path to true forgiveness runs along...

When sensual, submissive Sarah is ordered to come to dinner by the dominant Desmond Fox, she has no idea that she’ll be serving as the table.He introduces her to the kinky Japanese practice of nyotaimori: eating sushi from the naked body of a woman. Her naked body.Her silky-smooth, shaven body serves as a living sushi platter for a gathering of ten powerful businessmen. It takes hours for the men to eat all the sushi off her bare skin, while caress...

The best-selling author of the internationally acclaimed No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, Alexander McCall Smith continues to delight audiences with the hilarious adventure Unusual Uses for Olive Oil. When colleagues take issue with von Igelfeld's bachelor status, his friend Ophelia Prinzel endeavors to find him a good woman. Soon, the professor is on the path to romance with the charming widow Frau Benz - and it seems his true worth may finally be recognized.

Detective Ulf Varg from the Department of Sensitive Crimes is often called upon to investigate unusual matters. But rarely is he asked to conduct an inquiry on behalf of his own family. Is such a thing ethical? Adding to Ulf’s moral discomfort is the fact that he does not exactly see eye to eye with his younger brother Bjorn—a leading player in one of Sweden’s right-wing parties, the Moderate Extremists. Still, family is family, so Ulf finds himself working to uncover the mole leaking secr...

Fans of Patrick Taylor's bestselling Irish Country novels know Dr. Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly as the irascible senior partner of a general practice in the colourful Irish village of Ballybucklebo.But there was a time, shortly after arriving in Ballybucklebo, that Dr. O'Reilly was not widely accepted by the villagers. This touching short story tells of how O'Reilly, with a little help, began to overcome their objections.Whether you're visiting for the first time, or ...

It is said that a picture may be worth a thousand words but an old photograph can inspire many more. In 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, what made them sad?What emerges are surprising and poignant tales of love and friendship in a variety of settings - an estate in the Highlands of ...

Late one night, Commissario Guido Brunetti's telefonino rings. A old woman's body has been found in a Spartan apartment on Campo San Giacomo dell'Orio. Brunetti sees some signs of force on the old woman, but they could just as easily have been from the radiator near where she fell. When the medical examiner rules that the woman died of a heart attack, it seems there is nothing to investigate. But he can't shake the feeling that perhaps the woman was threatened.

Long before Dr. Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly made most readers' acquaintance in Patrick Taylor's bestselling novel An Irish Country Doctor, he appeared in a series of humorous columns originally published in Stitches: The Journal of Medical Humour.These warm and wryly amusing vignettes provide an early glimpse at the redoubtable Dr. O'Reilly as he tends to the colourful and eccentric residents of Ballybucklebo, a cozy Ulster village nestled in the by...

From some accidents of love and weather we never quite recover. At the worst of the Prairie dust bowl of the 1930s, a young man appears out of a blizzard and forever alters the lives of two sisters. There is the beautiful, fastidious Lucinda, and the tricky and tenacious Norma Joyce, at first a strange, self-possessed child, later a woman who learns something of self-forgiveness and of the redemptive nature of art. Their rivalry sets the stage for all that follows in a narrative spanning o...

From New York Times bestselling author Jacqueline Winspear, now available in paperback—the tenth novel in the New York Times bestselling Maisie Dobbs series—“a series that seems to get better with each entry” (Wall Street Journal)—in which the death of an Indian immigrant leads Maisie in an unexpected direction.In Leaving Everything Most Loved by New York Times bestselling author Jacqueline Winspear, Maisie Dobbs investi...

Working with the British Secret Service on an undercover mission, Maisie Dobbs is sent to Hitler’s Germany in this thrilling tale of danger and intrigue—the twelfth novel in Jacqueline Winspear’s New York Times bestselling “series that seems to get better with each entry” (Wall Street Journal).It’s early 1938, and Maisie Dobbs is back in England. On a fine yet chilly morning, as she walks towards Fitzroy Square—a place of many memories—she is intercepted by Brian ...