Mme Rabotswe Shares Recipes

You've read the books and now cook the food!

Precious Ramotswe, the protagonist of Alexander McCall-Smith's No1 Ladies' Detective Agency series shares her recipes for a whole range of nicely fattening treats to raise money for a range of Botswanan charities.

The book Mma Ramotswe's Cookbook will be published by Polygon in November and is the brain child of charity worker Stuart Brown, and McCall-Smith said he is delighted with it.

Now all that remains to be seen is if the "traditionally built" Mme Rabotswe is in the same league as Nigella and Jamie!

And which other fictional characters would you like to see shares recipes?

A Fable, A Whodunnit, and a Serialised Novel

This is the time of year when some good fiction starts to appear in the British newspapers. Here are some things I though you'd like :

At the Times Paul Coelho writes a Christmas fable.

There is also a mystery whodunnit, The Empty Chair. Actually not only whodunnit but who writit. It's introduced with these words :

An undisputed great of British literature wrote this newly discovered gem - can you play literary detective and work out who it is?

The perp will be unmasked next Sunday!

The Telegraph has a serialised novel, Corduroy Mansions, by Alexander McCall-Smith (yes, he of the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency). The series has now reached Chapter 65, but all the extracts so far are archived on the site, and new extracts are added each week day. Not only that, if you're feeling a little lazy, you can hear the story being read by Andrew Sachs (who played, of course, the hapless Manuel in Faulty Towers). You can even download the episodes to your iPod!

Want more? Hie thee then to the New Yorker which always has a great selection of new fiction. Among the latest offerings, a new story by Irish author William Trevor, The Woman of the House.

Postscript :

Let me add one more! Here's a short short story, Sultan's Battery, from Booker winner Aravind Adiga on the Age website.

Elsewhere Great Online Things

I had no characters, no plot, but there were no other problems ...

says Alexander McCall-Smith, creator of The Number One Ladies Detective Agency series and the most charming private-eye ever, Madam Ramotswe. Deepika Shetty blogs wonderfully about meeting the author in Singapore. And I am so jealous I could spit!

Meanwhile, online arts newspaper Kakiseni has a profile piece up on Malaysian short story writer Keris Mas. I remember reading translations of some of his stories some years back and liking them very much, and now wish I had a copies of his books. Has anyone seen them in the shops? Funny how - and once again I say this - there is so little available information on and promotion for local publications.

Meanwhile, Yang-May Ooi, currently packing her bags to fly back here for a visit, muses about how much an author should give away of the story they are writing. You can catch Yang-May at two events next Saturday (24th Feb), the Breakfast for Bloggers at the new MPH in Bangsar Village in the morning and in the afternoon at "Readings" at Seksan's. I'll be posting up more about these events shortly.

Meanwhile, Tungku Halim asks whether you write in silence, and if not, what's your soundtrack? (Me? I need silence.)

Meanwhile, Eric Forbes has a good go at local authors who don't read ... and if you make any claim to being a writer you should listen to what he's saying very carefully indeed. (And that's an order!)

And meanwhile, Ted finds hypermarkets a great place to shop for cheap books. Not only that but he has a lovely new teddy logo which really suits him, and who could resist pics of him a 5 year old complete with Beatles haircut! Cute! - both the teddy and Ted. But don't tell him I said that.

Christmas Fiction

In the mood for some good online reading? The book pages of the British newspapers have some great yuletide short stories, so put your feet up and enjoy:

The Blue Carbuncle, a Sherlock Holmes mystery by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the Sunday Times site (and in a companion piece, Alexander McCall Smith examines the appeal of Conan Doyles' work).

The Times also has Jeanette Winterson's Christmas Carol.

An exclusive new short story by Helen Simpson, The Festival of the Immortals, appears on The Guardian site.

And Salley Vickers has written a short story called Mrs Radinsky especially for The Observer.

Enjoy!

Malgudi Revisited

Fiction&Friends decided that this month they wanted to read RK Narayan's A Painter of Signs and last night we meet up to dissect it at La Bodega over several penitential jugs of margueritas (because, if you remember, I was responsible for picking the last book which the others did not like at all and had promised to buy the drinks!).

It's the story of a signpainter called Raman who falls in love with an emanicipated and high-minded woman called Daisy who approaches her job as family-planner with missionary zeal. Daisy enlists Raman's help on her visits to the countryside to talk to rural communities about the benefits of smaller families. Raman is to paint the signs and murals which will carry the family-planning slogans. But during the journey he becomes infatuated with Daisy and determines to make her his wife.

I hadn't been back to Narayan's fictional town of Malgudi (the setting of all his gentle, charming tales of Indian life) for a very long time, and was glad of the excuse to revisit. For the most of the group this was the first time they'd made the trip to Malgudi and they all thoroughly enjoyed Narayan's gentle humour and apparent simplicity. Someone drew an interesting parallel with Alexander McCall-Smith's First Ladies Detective Agency series which work the same kind of magic.

La Bodega wan't the best of venues for a meet, although the management kindly gave us a 15% discount: it was a bit noisy, a little smoky and very chilly. We're back to a member's house for our next discussion.