Book description
In Espresso Tales, Alexander McCall Smith returns home to Edinburgh and
the glorious cast of his own tales of the city, the residents of 44
Scotland Street, with a new set of challenges for each one of them.
Bruce, the intolerably vain and perpetually deluded ex-surveyor, is
about to embark on a new career as a wine merchant, while his
long-suffering flatmate Pat MacGregor, set up by matchmaking Domenica
Macdonald, finds herself invited to a nudist picnic in Moray Place in
the pursuit of true love. Prodigious six-year-old Bertie Pollock wants a
boy's life of fishing and rugby, not yoga and pink dungarees, and he
plots rebellion against his bossy, crusading mother Irene and his
psychotherapist Dr Fairbairn. But when Bertie's longed-for trip to
Glasgow with his ineffectual father Stuart ends with Bertie taking money
off legendary Glasgow hard man Lard O'Connor at cards, it looks as
though Bertie should have been more careful what he wished for. And all
the time it appears that both Irene Pollock and Dr Fairbairn are engaged
in a struggle with dark secrets and unconscious urges of their own.
