Pianos and Flowers: Brief Encounters of the Romantic Kind

By Alexander McCall Smith

In Pianos and Flowers we are invited to glimpse a world long departed. In these stories, inspired by long-lost photographs, the lives of the people in the frame are imagined and then explored, layer by layer.

Three sisters brought up in Penang, caught in the tide of war.

A group of small boys in a Glasgow slum – their childhood blighted by poverty, their adult lives taking very different paths.

A young woman’s search for love in the unlikely realm of Egyptian antiquities.

And through all of these photographs, and all of these stories, there runs the same refrain: the possibilities of love, of friendship, of happiness lie before us.