Alexander McCall Smith is the most genial of writers and most gentle of satirists. Although he has written more than 50 books, some of them children's books, some scholarly works, he is best known to American readers as the creator of Precious Ramotswe, the heroine of his Ladies' Detective Agency series set in Botswana.

These novels have become hugely popular with readers who find they learn a great deal about Africa while being entertained by a mild murder mystery, and charmed by the wise and warm woman that Precious is. McCall Smith himself knows the territory; he was born in what is now Zimbabwe and was a law professor in Botswana for a time.

Many of the same virtues of those novels are in evidence in 44 Scotland Street. This time, the scene is Edinburgh, a city he clearly loves.

Although the novel is just now being published in book form, readers in Scotland have already read it in serialization in a daily newspaper, The Scotsman. McCall Smith explains in the preface that this was a task he enjoyed, so much so that he is doing a second volume.

44 Scotland Street is not a detective story; it's more of a coming-of-age story. The young person in question is a 20-year-old named Pat who is trying to discover her direction in life. She is in what she refers to as a "gap year."

She tells us that many young people who have families of means take a "gap year" in the middle of their education, to travel or engage in some other form of self-discovery. Whatever a gap year is supposed to accomplish, it failed with Pat. She's now in her second gap year, trying again.

She has moved out of her parents' home into a flat she'll be sharing with strangers and taken a vaguely defined job in an art gallery with a feckless owner. The heart of the book is the people she and the reader meet, the eccentrics who fill the gap and who teach her about love, friendship and responsibility.

And these characters are great fun. First we meet Bruce, handsome and vain, and more than a little silly. His shallowness is offset by Domenica, a 60ish widow who has worked as an anthropologist studying feral children and who now drives, with great joy, a custard-colored Mercedes coupe. One floor below live a pretentious couple, Irene and Stuart, and their child, a precocious five-year-old, Bertie, whom they are raising as a genius. He plays the saxophone and is learning Italian.

There are others: Big Lou, for example, the coffee-shop owner who is reading all the books that were left behind by the previous owner who was running a secondhand bookstore, everything from Proust to fishing guides.

McCall Smith treats all of them with affection and never allows any of them to get out of hand. Despite eccentricities and minor character flaws, they are all people of good heart, common sense and decency. Even the peacock Bruce gains a bit of the reader's sympathy at the end.

The possible exception is Irene, the domineering and deluded mother of the genius-to-be; she is quite ridiculous, but she gets her comeuppance. Bertie rebels; he wants the life of an ordinary boy. He's suspended from his pre-school for writing an insult (in Italian) to his teacher on the bathroom wall. At home, he sets fire to his father's newspaper while his father is reading it. Consequently, he's off to therapy.

Irene explains the situation to Domenica when they meet in the hall:

"It's nothing really. There was a bit of difficulty with a rather limited Teacher at the nursery school. Unimaginative really. And now we're giving Bertie a bit of self-enhancement time."

The serialization of 44 Scotland Street has resulted in an episodic structure, a series of vignettes or self-contained chapters. Any sustained plot or suspense centers on one of the paintings in the gallery.

Pat suspects that the painting may be an undiscovered work by a famous Scottish artist. Her suspicions are fed by an over-eager buyer and a break-in at the gallery. The issue is not resolved until the end of the book, and the resolution is witty and in keeping with the tone of the rest of the novel. McCall Smith has less interest in large dramatic canvases than in the behavior of everyday people. As he remarks, "It is in observing the minor ways of people that one can still see very clearly the moral dilemmas of our time."

Life's lessons are laid on in this novel with the lightest of touch.

Mary J. Elkins is a faculty member in the Honors College at Colorado State University. She lives in Fort Collins.