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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Sep 2004, 256 pages
Paperback:
Jul 2005, 272 pages
Book Reviewed by:
BookBrowse Review Team
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Filled with thorny characters and a Scottish atmosphere as thick as a highland mist, The Sunday Philosophy Club is irresistible, and Isabel Dalhousie is the most delightful literary sleuth since Precious Ramotswe.
With The Sunday Philosophy Club, Alexander McCall Smith, the author of the best-selling and beloved No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency novels, begins a wonderful new series starring the irrepressibly curious Isabel Dalhousie.
Isabel is fond of problems, and sometimes she becomes interested in problems that are, quite frankly, none of her business. This may be the case when Isabel sees a young man plunge to his death from the upper circle of a concert hall in Edinburgh. Despite the advice of her housekeeper, Grace, who has been raised in the values of traditional Edinburgh, and her niece, Cat, who, if you ask Isabel, is dating the wrong man, Isabel is determined to find the truth–if indeed there is one–behind the man's death. The resulting moral labyrinth might have stymied even Kant. And then there is the unsatisfactory turn of events in Cat's love life that must be attended to.
Filled with thorny characters and a Scottish atmosphere as thick as a highland mist, The Sunday Philosophy Club is irresistible, and Isabel Dalhousie is the most delightful literary sleuth since Precious Ramotswe.
Chapter One
Isabel Dalhousie saw the young man fall from the edge of the upper circle, from the gods. His flight was so sudden and short, and it was for less than a second that she saw him, hair tousled, upside down, his shirt and jacket up around his chest so that his midriff was exposed. And then, striking the edge of the grand circle, he disappeared headfirst towards the stalls below.
Her first thought, curiously, was of Auden's poem on the fall of Icarus. Such events, said Auden, occur against a background of people going about their ordinary business. They do not look up and see the boy falling from the sky. I was talking to a friend, she thought. I was talking to a friend and the boy fell out of the sky.
She would have remembered the evening, even if this had not happened. She had been dubious about the concert-a performance by the Reykjavik Symphony, of which she had never heard-and would not have gone had not a spare ticket been pressed upon her by a neighbour. ...
I have to fundamentally disagree with the reviewer who writes 'unfortunately, Smith's subplots are more interesting than the main mystery and the key character gets bogged down in too many philosophical digressions'. I disagree because, as far as I'm concerned, the whole joy of this book, and for that matter the 'No.1 Ladies Detective Agency' series, is the fact that the plot is entirely secondary to the digressions!
The Sunday Philosophy Club (the first in a new series from McCall Smith) is set in his home town of Edinburgh, Scotland. As with the Mma Ramotswe books, the story is not driven by the plot so much as the commentary. However, the difference is that whereas Mma Ramotswe is an African Miss Marple - who has an instinctive understanding of people based on her close observations of life in her own small community, the star of this new series is an extremely well read moral philosopher named Isabel Dalhousie which gives McCall Smith a wider and more sophisticated canvas on which to work. The Sunday Philosophy Club is very clever, but without ever being obvious or overstated and is stuffed full of wonderful one-liners such as 'cooking in a temper requires caution with the pepper'. All in all, it's a pleasure to read.
If you're a North American fan of Mma Ramotswe, don't despair - there's at least one more in the series to come. In The Company of Cheerful Ladies has recently been published in the UK and Australia and will be available in the USA and Canada in April 2005...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
By the end of 2005 Alexander McCall Smith will have published 10, yes 10, books in the USA during the year.
alone:
In The Company of Cheerful Ladies: A hardcover of the 5th volume in the No.1 Ladies Detective Agency series (April) plus a paperback version of #4, The Full Cupboard of Life (January), and 2 reprints of The No.1 Ladies Detective Agency in late Summer/Fall.
(He plans an eight book cap on this series).
Friends, Lovers, Chocolate (the second in The Sunday Philosophy Club series - hardcover) in September, and a The Sunday Philosophy Club itself in paperback now.
(He has a four book deal for this series).
...
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