Alexander McCall Smith, The Girl Who Married a Lion

This is a collection of 33 folktales from Zimbabwe and Botswana that Alexander McCall Smith has retold and, I guess, expanded on to an extent. They are lovely stories with the sort of content and sometimes absurd plots and logic that one sees in folktales—talking animals and reanimated corpses and witchcraft and so on. Maybe it's because I grew up reading fairy tales, or maybe everyone feels this way, but there is something immediately inviting and almost exciting about stories like these. You quickly enter into a world that's like ours but where so much more is possible and where characters act in ways that only make sense in fiction. The stories are told in simple sentences that grab you and pull you in. Here is the first paragraph of one story ("Head Tree") as an example:

 "A man who had never done any wrong to anybody else had a great misfortune happen to him. His wife noticed that a tree was beginning to grow out of his head. This was not painful to the man, but it made him feel awkward when there were other people about. They would point at him and say that this was a very strange thing to happen. Some people walked some miles to see this man sitting outside his hut with a tree growing out of his head."

I love it. How can you not want to know what happens to this man with a tree growing out of his head? And it's just so perfect in its simplicity. You'd think it would be easy to write so simply, but I don't think it is. In this case, the stories have presumably been passed down orally for generations and thus smoothed into simplicity like a stone smoothed by water. But McCall Smith's own modern prose shares this delightful simplicity as well. Here's another example of what I love about these stories. A hyena is left to guard a well while his friends look for food, and so he waits:

"He sat in the shade of a tree and thought about things that hyenas like to think about, which are not things that you and I would understand."

Again, I love this. No need to imagine what's going on in the hyena's head. We wouldn't understand! If you like folktales, take a look at this collection, and read it to your kids. They'll enjoy it.