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Friends, Lovers, Chocolate  is the second of the  Sunday Philosophy Club series of novels by  Alexander McCall Smith , set in  Edinburgh , Scotland, and featuring the protagonist Isabel Dalhousie. It was first published in 2005, and is the sequel to  The Sunday Philosophy Club . Isabel Dalhousie  is in her early forties and lives alone in Edinburgh. Due to an inheritance from her late mother, she can work for a nominal fee as the editor of the  Review of  Applied Ethics . Her closest friends are her niece  Cat , a young woman who runs a  delicatessen ; her  housekeeper   Grace , who is outspoken and interested in  spiritualism ; Cat’s ex-boyfriend  Jamie , a  bassoonist  to whom Isabel has been secretly attracted ever since they met; and  Brother Fox , an urban  fox who lives in Isabel’s garden. When visiting Cat’s delicatessen one lunchtime, Isabel meets  Ian , who has recently had a...

Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Bill Nighy and most of the remaining cast of 'The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel' are reunited for this follow-up film also featuring Richard Gere Honestly titled if nothing else,  The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel  is a sluggish also-ran compared to its predecessor, 2011’s retirement-themed comedy-drama  The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel . That original film, like this one directed by  John Madden  ( Shakespeare in Love ), was no great masterpiece to start with given its on-the-nose script and shameless sentimentality. But it was likeable enough, and at least had the distinction of being one of the first films to tap successfully into the increasingly significant greying demographic by assembling an all-star cast of treasured British thespians playing plucky types finding a new lease on late life in India. Rounding up most of the old gang once again, and throwing in a couple of American names (including  Richard Gere  and...

Admirers of Nicole Krauss’s novel  “The History of Love”  (and they are many, and I am one) will want to know the answer to this question: How much does her new novel, “Great House,” resemble its predecessor? The good news is: very much indeed. And the good news is also: not so very much. Il In themes and preoccupations, “Great House” and “The History of Love” overlap. Both explore shattered characters, with pasts blasted by the sort of loss that makes even the pretense of normal life impossible. (By “normal life” let us mean one in which certain premises can be assumed — for example, that it is possible to put one foot in front of the other, on the way to meet a lover or to buy a loaf of rye bread, without being overtaken by tremors issuing from convulsions of the moral order.) The narrative structures of both books mirror the characters’ own shattering and require readers to reassemble the full story for themselves. And both books coalesce around artifacts from the ...