Alexander McCall Smith

Features two stand-alone BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramas.

The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency

Srijita Sarkar 

And my wife had brought her to meet me off the bus. She stood there, with the child in her arms, the child who was more valuable to me than all the gold taken out of those mines in Johannesburg. This was my firstborn, and my only child, my girl, my Precious Ramotswe.

Love was a form of blindness that closed the eyes to the most glaring faults

Masculine bad behaviour. "Men do terrible things."

Why did love—and sex—complicate life so much? It would be far simpler for us not to have to worry about them.

What use was it having all that money if you could never sit still or just watch your cattle eating grass?

You can go through life and make new friends every year—every month practically—but there was never any substitute for those friendships of childhood that survive into adult years. Those are the ones in which we are bound to one another with hoops of steel.

He looked at her in the darkness, at this woman who was everything to him—mother, Africa, wisdom, understanding, good things to cat, pumpkins, chicken, the smell of sweet cattle breath, the white sky across the endless, endless bush, and the giraffe that cried, giving its tears for women to daub on their baskets; O Botswana, my country, my place.

Any time he tried to tell her what was in his heart, the words which came to him seemed so inadequate.

The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency quotes

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