Mma Ramotswe had a gift for the American woman, a basket which on her return journey from Bulawayo she had bought, on impulse, from a woman sitting by the side of the road in Francistown. The woman wa...
Matthew knew that phrenology was nonsense, and yet, years later, he found himself making judgments similar to those made by his father; slippery people looked slippery; they really did. And how we bec...
Many people only go to see other people when they want to ask for some favour.
Make a list of what you know, what you don’t know, and what you’d like to know. Make a list of possible outcomes. Choose the outcome you think is best, then go for that!
MMA RAMOTSWE observed speed limits for two reasons. One of these was that she believed that laws were there to be obeyed, and that if everybody drove as fast as they liked there would be mayhem on the...
Love is nothing out of the ordinary, even if we think it is; even if we idealise it, celebrate it in poetry, sentimentalise it in coy valentines. Love happens to just about everyone; it is like measle...
Let’s not have a sniffle, let’s have a jolly good cry And always remember, the longer you live, the sooner you jolly well die.
I’m taking on another person’s memories, another person’s family, another person’s life. Love obscured all of that because if it did not, then nobody would marry at all, and there had to be marriage,...
It's so difficult to sustain a fatwa,' said Domenica. 'One has to be so enthusiastic. I'm not sure if I could find the moral energy myself.
It would be strange to live in a country where people were silent, passing one another in the street wordlessly, as if frightened of what the other might think or say. This was not the African way, wh...
It was, he thought, his gesture against the whole pro-euthanasia movement that talked so glibly of choice without realising the fire with which one played when tinkering with fragile taboos against ki...
It was reasonable enough, of course, for people to wish to speak to a man, if that is what they wanted, but that did not mean that a man would be better.
It was just too easy to say that adults did not like stories that were simple, and perhaps that was wrong. Perhaps that was what adults really wanted, searched for and rarely found: a simple story in...
It was easy to be moral when that was the way you felt anyway. The hard bit about morality was making yourself feel the opposite of what you really felt.
It was always disconcerting to meet those who had become so obsessed with a single topic that they could not see their concerns in context.
It was all a question of face, she decided: you had to leave room for face to be saved.
It was a warm evening, at least by the standards applied in Scotland, where summer is sometimes no more than a promise, an aspiration
It was a pointed sigh, as sighs sometimes are, not one cast into the air to evaporate, but one calculated to descend, precisely and with great effect, on a target.
It was a good place to sit and listen, under a sky that had seen so much and heard so much that one more wicked deed would surely make no difference. Sins, thought Mma Ramotswe, are darker and more po...
It was Lennie Marchbanks at the door. She had met him once or twice before and rather liked him; mechanics struck her as being such easy, agreeable people. And, she noticed, as a psychotherapist, one...