Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

Alexander "Sandy" McCall Smith, CBE, FRSE, is a Rhodesian-born Scottish writer and Emeritus Professor of Medical Law at the University of Edinburgh. In the late 20th century, McCall Smith became a respected expert on medical law and bioethics and served on British and international committees... concerned with these issues. He has since become internationally known as a writer of fiction. He is most widely known as the creator of the The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series. Alexander McCall Smith was born in Bulawayo, in what was then Southern Rhodesia and is now Zimbabwe. His father worked as a public prosecutor in what was then a British colony. He was educated at the Christian Brothers College before moving to Scotland to study law at the University of Edinburgh, where he received his Ph.D. in law. He soon taught at Queen's University Belfast, and while teaching there he entered a literary competition: one a children's book and the other a novel for adults. He won in the children's category, and published thirty books in the 1980s and 1990s. He returned to southern Africa in 1981 to help co-found and teach law at the University of Botswana.
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The Sunday Philosophy Club is a series of novels by the author Alexander McCall Smith. It is also the name of the first novel in the series, and an informal talking group founded by the main character Isabel Dalhousie. The series is set in Edinburgh. The title of the first book and of the series... was suggested by McCall Smith's editor. The series of novels includes: The Sunday Philosophy Club marked a departure from the gentle Botswana setting of McCall Smith’s previous series: in an interview in May 2004, McCall Smith said, “I’m enjoying it immensely, writing about a different milieu.” The series was set in Edinburgh because McCall Smith “wanted to write something about Scotland” and finds Edinburgh “a very interesting and intriguing city.” The series tries to reflect the Edinburgh people, who are “vivid agreeable people just waiting to have a novel written about them.” Particular comparisons have been made between McCall’s Edinburgh and the version of the city that appears in Ian Rankin’s books.
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