One City, three authors
Love Edinburgh? Love Alexander McCall Smith, Ian Rankin and Irvine Welsh? Then here's the book for you.
UNESCO's inaugural City of Literature's most famous sons have joined forces to write a series of three interlinking stories about Edinburgh, collected in a single book, One City, published on Saturday by Polygon, priced £5.99. The proceeds from the book, which also includes an introduction by another famous author-resident, JK Rowling, will go to the OneCity Trust, which fights social exclusion in Edinburgh.
Home to the Scottish Parliament, the Festival and a world-famous skyline (not to mention plenty of conspicuously moneyed denizens) the city presents a prosperous face to the world. Beneath the elegant surface, however, the situation is rather less palatable. According to the OneCity website, one in five children in the city grows up in a household below the level of income support, and one in three leaves school at 16. Rowling uses her introduction to highlight the very real need for the work that the charity does. Now one of the city's greatest success stories, she remembers what it was to live on "the outskirts of society" in Edinburgh, where "violence, crime and addiction were part of everyday life". "I felt in those days as though there was an abyss separating me from those who bustled past me carrying briefcases and Jenners bags," she says of her life then, "and, in truth, there was."
The juxtaposition of Rankin, Welsh and McCall Smith's radically different takes on Edinburgh life succeeds in drawing attention to the city's diverse social mix; in the space of 100 pages the reader moves from the world of Leith junkies to that of the New Town haute bourgeoisie. Interested? Then you're in luck: the good people at Polygon have kindly allowed us to reprint the first two chapters of Alexander McCall Smith's story, The Unfortunate Fate of Kitty Da Silva, for your delectation. Here you go. Now, don't say we never do anything for you.
