Thursday 16 August 2012

Festival City

Edinburgh is rife with festivals.  There is even a website listing them.   The city is the setting for a new novella by John Robertson Nicoll called The Balloon Man in Edinburgh.
On a fine Spring day in Edinburgh a strange, shabby little man alights from the train at Waverley Station and makes a beeline for Princes Street Gardens bearing gifts for the squirrels that inhabit the trees there. He meets an old Polish gentleman who, feeling sorry for the little "tramp", offers him free temporary accommodation in his large house on the edge of the City's New Town. But old Josef doesn't know what he has let himself or his tenants in for. Over the next few days the old landlord, poor lovelorn Miss Laird and the crook, Driscoll, will all feel the effect of Buster's presence and their lives will be changed forever.
Currently it is available in a Kindle edition, £1.78, and there is a free Kindle app for those of us - like me - who haven't got a Kindle and want to read it on the PC

John R Nicoll also has a blog and is supposed - nudge nudge - to be getting on with writing an important fact-based play about Scotswoman  Jane Haining, who refused to abandon the pupils under her care when the Nazis took power in Hungary. 

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