A Carnbeg Affair

Ceud Mile Failte. A Hundred Thousand Welcomes. A Carnbeg Affair is a collection of short stories celebrating the diversity of life in a spa resort in the wooded hills of Perthshire.A mysterious Red Indian in feathered headdress appears on High Street one morning – some teenagers on holiday devise a love-story for a lonely cycle repairman - the municipal dump yields its secrets after-hours to its canny keeper – a Viennese waltz king and BBC Home Service star finds himself dancing with his own worst demons – a Christmas present, a bright green pashmina wrap, turns one woman’s life upside-down. An elderly rabbi is too wily to be tricked into believing Carnbeg is Paradise – a Communist-run children’s camp in the 1950s makes a sceptic out of one 10 year old boy – Carnbeg acquires a taste for India from Shuggy the rickshaw driver and, earlier, the tireless tiffin-seller at the railway station in her loose trousers and bare feet. Two dozen stories - ranging from the suspenseful to the poignant, from the emotionally wrought to the outrageously comic – add up to a highly entertaining portrait of this fictional Highlands town, a place which is already familiar to newspaper and magazine readers and to radio listeners.Enjoy! - and Haste Ye Back. Further Carnbeg collections will follow.