Beyond the Book: Background information when reading The Full Cupboard of Life

Beyond the Book

This article relates to The Full Cupboard of Life

Series Order

1. The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency
2. Tears of The Giraffe
3. Morality For Beautiful Girls
4. The Kalahari Typing School For Men 
5. The Full Cupboard of Life (UK May 2003, US May 2004)
6. In The Company of Cheerful Ladies (UK July 2004, USA April 19th 2005)

No news is bad news for Mma Ramotswe fans; I can find no sign of any further books in the series on the horizon; however, I do see a follow up to The Sunday Philosophy Club that looks like it will be published later this year.  Friends, Lovers, Chocolate appears to be scheduled for release in the USA, Canada and UK  in the Fall of  2005 

In addition to all his other projects, McCall Smith also finds time to play in the Really Terrible Orchestra and write a daily column for The Scotsman newspaper titled 44 Scotland Street - writing over 110,000 words in 6 months!  Television and movie rights based on the series have recently been sold to Working Title Films (who produced Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City); and McCall Smith began a second series of daily columns about 44 Scotland Street  in October 2004. 

He also published an engaging collection of African folk tales in late 2004, 'The Girl Who Married A Lion'.  We read some of them and found them to be interesting from an adult point of view (think of a cross between Grimm and Aesop), but we stopped after about half a dozen as they weren't resonating with the children, and some of the stories were quite disturbing to the modern sensibilities of children brought up on the sweetened fairy tales of today - as opposed to my warped childhood on a diet of Grimm and Lang!

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This article relates to The Full Cupboard of Life. It first ran in the February 2, 2005 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.