44 Scotland Street - Alexander McCall Smith (44 Scotland Street #1)

Alexander McCall Smith’s Scotland Street occupies a busy, bohemian corner of Edinburgh’s New Town, where the old haute bourgeoisie finds itself having to rub shoulders with students, poets and portraitists. And number 44 has more than its fair share of the street’s eccentrics and failures.

When Pat – on her second gap year and a source of some worry to her parents – is accepted as a new tenant at number 44, she isn’t quite sure how long she’ll last. Her flatmate Bruce, a rugby-playing chartered surveyor, is impossibly narcissistic, carelessly philandering, and infuriatingly handsome. Downstairs lives the gloriously pretentious Irene, whose precocious five-year-old is in therapy after setting fire to his father’s copy of the Guardian. And then there is the shrewd, intellectual Domenica MacDonald, mysteriously employed but a sharp-eyed observer of the house’s activities in her spare time...

Dry, funny, hugely entertaining, with its glittering cast of rogues, oddballs and innocents, McCall Smith’s Scotland Street is proof that the author of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency can be as witty, incisive and humane in observing his native Edinburgh as his adopted Botswana.