At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances - (Professor Dr Von Igelfeld) by Alexander McCall Smith (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Professor Dr. von Igelfeld Entertainment - Book 3

The Professor Dr. von Igelfeld Entertainment series slyly skewers academia, chronicling the comic misadventures of the endearingly awkward Professor Dr. Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, and his long-suffering colleagues at the Institute of Romantic Philology in Germany.

Readers who fell in love with Precious Ramotswe, proprietor of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, now have new cause for celebration in the protagonist of these three light-footed comic novels by Alexander McCall Smith. Welcome to the insane and rarified world of Professor Dr. Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld of the Institute of Romance Philology. Von Igelfeld is engaged in a never-ending quest to win the respect he feels certain he is due-a quest which has the tendency to go hilariously astray.

In At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances, Professor Dr. von Igelfeld gets caught up in a nasty case of academic intrigue while on sabbatical at Cambridge. When he returns to Regensburg he is confronted with the thrilling news that someone from a foreign embassy has actually checked his masterwork, Portuguese Irregular Verbs, out of the Institute's Library. As a result, he gets caught up in intrigue of a different sort on a visit to Bogota, Colombia.

Review Quotes

"In the halls of academe, a setting fraught with ego-driven battles for power and prestige [Alexander McCall Smith] has rendered yet another one-of-a-kind character: the bumbling but brilliant Dr. Mortiz-Maria von Igelfeld . . . . [a] deftly rendered trilogy [with] endearingly eccentric characters." --Chicago Sun-Times

About the Author

Alexander McCall Smith is the author of the international phenomenon The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, and of a new series, The Sunday Philosophy Club. He was born in what is now known as Zimbabwe and was a law professor at the University of Botswana. He lives in Scotland, where he is a professor of medical law at Edinburgh University.