Best-selling author Alexander McCall Smith turns detective in his adopted home of Edinburgh to explore one of the strangest literary stories of the 18th century. In 1761, a Scot named James Macpherson published what he claimed were the collected works of a poet named Ossian, written more than 1,000 years ago and providing Scotland with an epic to rival Homer's Iliad.

But Dr Samuel Johnson repeatedly questioned the veracity of the poems, until the general consensus was that they were not bona fide translations from the Gaelic, and Macpherson was damned as one of the all-time great literary fakes. From being heaped with praise, he saw his reputation go into freefall and he fled the country.

In The Great Ossian Hoax, Alexander McCall Smith investigates whether Macpherson was truly deserving of this lasting reputation as an epic fraudster.

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