| International Standard Book Number |
9780593315750 (hardcover)
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| International Standard Book Number |
1141021189 (hardcover)
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| International Standard Book Number |
9780593315767 (ebk)
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| Personal Name |
McCall Smith, Alexander, 1948- author.
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| Title Statement |
Pianos and flowers : brief encounters of the romantic kind / Alexander McCall Smith.
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| Edition Statement |
First United States edition.
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| Production, Publication, Distribution, Manufacture, and Copyright Notice |
New York : Pantheon Books, 2020.
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| Physical Description |
ix, 179 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm.
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| General Note |
Originally published in Great Britain by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd, Edinburgh in 2019.
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| Formatted Contents Note |
Pianos and flowers -- I'd cry buckets -- Sphinx -- Maternal designs -- The dwarf tale-teller of the Romanian Rom -- Duty -- Iron jelloids -- Students -- Zeugma -- Urchins -- St. John's wort -- Blackmail -- Pogo sticks and man with bicycle -- La plage.
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| Summary, Etc. |
"In Pianos and Flowers we are invited, through the medium of sepia images, 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. What must have it like to be them? We hold our breath for them. Our heart beats faster for them. We look again at the photograph in a new light, and say Yes, it might have happened just like that. This journey of exploration takes us to some exotic places. We share the lives of three sisters, brought up in Penang. We read of what happened to them, and to their Chinese neighbors caught in the tides of war. We see a group of small boys in a Glasgow slum, their young lives stunted by poverty, and hear how life worked out in contrasting ways for them. We follow 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. There are big stories in these simple pictures. At first glance the photographs may seem unexceptional: the mere freezing of a moment in time. But delve deeper and you will realize that these photographs speak volumes"-- Provided by publisher.
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| Subject Added Entry - Topical Term |
Photographs Fiction.
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| Subject Added Entry - Topical Term |
Interpersonal relations Fiction.
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| Subject Added Entry - Geographical Term |
London (England) Fiction.
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| Subject Added Entry - Geographical Term |
Egypt Antiquities Fiction.
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| Index Term-Genre/Form |
Romance fiction.
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| Index Term-Genre/Form |
Short stories.
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| Index Term-Genre/Form |
Love stories.
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