I found it hard to keep the characters differentiated and the tone had none of the gentle humour of his usual work, which left it rather flat. ( )

2023-11-19: This was lovely. I don't even know what to say about it beyond it being about decent people being decent. Humanity needs a LOT more examples of that but it turns out that modelling violence and antisocial behavior makes more money so that's mostly what we get. Thanks, capitalism.

This was lovely. ( )

This is not Alexander McCall- Smith's best book. At times it was even boring. I think I will stick with the more humorous books. ( )

A beautifully sensitive book recounting the love stories of 4 random strangers sharing a train compartment on the journey between Edinburgh and London.

This book is in the genre, so popular in Victorian and Edwardian times and well into the 20th century under the pen of Dorothy Sayers and others, of random tales told to chance-encountered strangers. Trains featured in many of these stories in Victorian times as well, when it wasn't gentlemen's clubs. But I fear that my previous reading gave me subconscious expectations that this book failed to meet. There was no mysterious murder, no creeping horror, no whiff of the supernatural! In fact, it was very much in the vein of the Philosophy Club books featuring Isabel Dalhousie. Pretty tame, not to mention so slow moving that it made me almost want to read the book aloud just to see if there would be time for all that chit-chat during the course of the journey from Edinburgh to London. Of course there are probably a lot of delays on BritRail these days. ( )