From the author of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series!Knopf Canada is very proud to announce the first-ever Canadian publication of bestselling author Alexander McCall Smith’s books for young readers, featuring the extraordinary Harriet Bean.In the first book, The Lost Five Aunts of Harriet Bean, Alexander McCall Smith takes readers into the world of 9-year-old Harriet, who lives alone with her father, an absentminded inventor of extraordinary but useless things. When Harriet’s father tells her one day that she has five aunts–his sisters–that he’s never told her about before, and with whom he tragically lost touch in childhood, Harriet is delighted, and determined to track down each of her colourful aunts one-by-one. Will Harriet Bean be able to reunite her father and his sisters–Veronica, Harmonica, Majolica, and the twins, Japonica and Thessalonika?“Strangely enough, I didn’t even know I had any aunts until I was nine. Then, quite out the blue, my father said to me one day:‘Your aunts would like to hear about that!’I forget what it was my aunts would have liked to hear about–I was so astonished to hear that they even existed.‘Aunts?’ I said in surprise. ‘What aunts?’‘Oh,’ said my father, rather vaguely, as if it weren’t at all important. ‘All those aunts of yours. You know–my sisters. All those aunts you have.’”–Excerpt from The Lost Five Aunts of Harriet Bean Read Less