10 Scotland Street – the story of an Edinburgh home and its cast of booksellers, silk merchants, sailors, preachers, politicians, cholera and coincidence and its widespread connections over two centuries across the globe.

Leslie Hills is a film producer. This is her first book.

This is a triumph. A love letter to the ghosts of Edinburgh. I feel its hand upon my shoulder.
– Sara Sheridan

As a writer of fiction, I found myself itching to lift some of these characters from the page into the fertile fields of my own imagination.
– Val McDermid

A fascinating and thoroughly enjoyable book, a work of prodigious research […] Anyone who loves Edinburgh and is fascinated by its private histories will be entranced by this book.
– Allan Massie, The Scotsman

Hills proceeds with thorough scholarship […] Above all, she writes really well: fluent, authoritative, persuasive prose, sometimes anecdotal, often slyly colliding formality and contemporary colloquialism.
– Broughton Spurtle

The writing matches the process of researching in an archive when one’s eye is caught by something not directly concerned with the matter in hand, the so-called ‘rabbit holes’. There is a veritable warren of these […] I was genuinely sad to come to the final page of this book. I heartily recommend it.
– Edward Duvall, Old Edinburgh Club

A vivid portrait of individuals and social history of Georgian Edinburgh, incorporating global events and their inevitable consequences […] This book is a labour of love and a tribute to the predecessors whose spirit [Leslie] feels keenly.
– Susan Fabbro, Qualified Genealogist