Tiny Tales – a unique collaboration from bestselling author Alexander McCall Smith and illustrator Iain McIntosh. Perfect short stories that dance across your mind just as an amuse bouche dances on your tongue.
Stories do not have to be long. In the space of a couple of sentences – or even a page or two – we may see the human heart exposed in a way that is more powerful than occurs in many much longer narratives.
In Tiny Tales Alexander McCall Smith explores romance, ambition, kindness and happiness in thirty short stories that range in length from the short to the minuscule. The settings are as diverse as the characters – Scotland, England, Australia, the United States – combining to create a rich and surprising tableau. An Australian pope? A persuasive cosmetic surgeon? The world’s laziest cat? A group of students living together and getting romantically entangled? All human and animal life is here – in miniature.
These stories are inspired and accompanied by the thirty magnificent strip Tiny Tales created by McCall Smith and illustrated by the brilliant Iain McIntosh – each cartoon a little gem of observation.
Tiny Tales strips appeared every week in the Financial Times for a four month period.
Very short stories are not the exclusive preserve of writers. Illustrators are also adept at the form, and it was for this reason that I approached the well-known Scottish illustrator Iain McIntosh to see whether he would be interested in embarking on a series of extremely brief stories. The idea was that Iain would draw four panels in which a whole story would be illustrated with the minimum of text.
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