ROAD to Paradise: A Collection of Cumbrian Short Stories, by Irvine Hunt. Cumbria and Lake District Life Magazine, Carlisle, 2003. £14.59.
The road to paradise leads to the past in Irvine Hunt's new book, a collection of 14 short stories of Cumbrian life as it used to be.
Mr Hunt's stories evoke the people and places of a passing way of life in Cumberland, Westmorland and Furness the old places before they were bundled together'.
The tone of the collection is set early, in the first story - Changing Rhythms: "Their world was a quieter world, a less hurried world than ours of this millennium though still, just as now, with its sharp edges and its cruel times.
"A world of working folk, of feuding brothers, a thieving couple desperate for a crust, an old man, clinging to his farm as eviction threatens."
Pig stickings, Ulverston market, a clutch of marigolds shyly held and two tramps trudging to Carlisle are just a few of the vignettes that vividly recreate a past that echoes around the hills of modern Cumbria.
Andy Bloxham
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