The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon (No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency #14) – Alexander McCall Smith
Modern ideas get tangled up with traditional ones in the latest intriguing installment in the beloved, best-selling No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series.
Precious Ramotswe has taken on two puzzling cases. First she is approached by the lawyer Mma Sheba, who is the executor of a deceased farmer’s estate. Mma Sheba has a feeling that the young man who has stepped forward may be falsely impersonating the farmer’s nephew in order to claim his inheritance. Mma Ramotswe agrees to visit the farm and find out what she can about the self-professed nephew. Then the proprietor of the Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon comes to Mma Ramotswe for advice. The opening of her new salon has been shadowed by misfortune. Not only has she received a bad omen in the mail, but rumors are swirling that the salon is using dangerous products that burn people’s skin. Could someone be trying to put the salon out of business?
Meanwhile, at the office, Mma Ramotswe has noticed something different about Grace Makutsi lately. Though Mma Makutsi has mentioned nothing, it has become clear that she is pregnant . . . But in Botswana—a land where family has always been held above all else—this may be cause for controversy as well as celebration.
The driver’s job is to stay in control behind the wheel and that is all. The past is what you leave as you go. There is nothing more to it.
When Emine Aksu, the flamboyant wife of an Istanbul style guru, suddenly goes missing, Inspector Cetin Ikmen’s investigation leads him deep into her strange and colorful past
Aliya may not have inherited her family’s patrician looks, but she is as much a prey to the legends of her family that stretch back to the days of Timur Lang. Aristocratic and eccentric-the clan has plenty of stories to tell, and secrets to hide.
His greatest passion is the M CC – the Malgudi Cricket Club – which he founds together with his friends: his greatest day is when the examinations are over and school breaks up – a time for revelry and cheerful riotousness. But the innocent and impulsive Swami lands in trouble when he is carried away by the more serious unrest of India in 1930. Somehow he gets himself expelled from two schools in succession, and when things have gone quite out of hand he is forced to run away from home …This is far more than a simple narrative of Swami’s adventures – charming and entertaining as they are. By the delicate sympathetically observed, the author establishes for us the child’s world as the child himself sees it: and beyond, the adult community he will one day belong to – in Swami’s case, the town of Malgudi, which provides the setting of almost all Narayan’s later novels.
Memories and Such 