Pianos and Flowers is a remarkable gift of engaging short stories imagined by one the world’s greatest story writers.
Earlier this year, Alexander McCall Smith met the Scottish editor of The Sunday Times and agreed to write a series of short stories which would run in the paper. The Sunday Times opened up their archive of photographs and Alexander selected anonymous, black and white pictures, imagined the story behind the scenes depicted, and created delightfully playful stories to enchant the reader. These stories appeared in the paper but since then, Alexander has reshaped them, added new stories and they have now grown into a powerful, hugely entertaining collection of tales of love and romance: Pianos and Flowers.
When I was asked by the The Sunday Times to write a number of short stories for the newspaper, I suggested that I should select photographs from their extensive photographic archive, and create stories based on what I imagined the pictures depicted. Six of the stories were published in the paper – a few of them are included here, but the rest are new. We do not know, of course, who the people in these photographs were, nor what they were up to. They were almost certainly not doing what I say they are, but that is the joy of looking at photographs in this way: from the tiniest visual clue we can create a whole hinterland of experience – of love, of hope, of simply being human.
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