Many years ago on holiday in Cumbria, author William Wood was enchanted by a village not unlike that portrayed in his new book.

“Imagine what it would be like to live here,” he said to Anna, his wife. Neither ever dreamed this dream would come true.

William was brought up in the South East and got to know Europe and its languages well before he had even travelled North of the Watford Gap, only then to attend Nottingham University. Upon graduating he went as a £10 Pom to Australia to work as a Teaching Fellow at the new university of Monash. There followed a nomadic career in India, Norway, East and West Africa and Belgium. His experience of life in South Sudan led to the publication of his first novel, “No Time for Poetry.”

He has written stories all his life. While looking after his ageing parents for three years in Kent he produced “Trying to Care,” attempting to portray the funny side as well as the despair and sheer exhaustion of caring for two nonagenarians with dementia.

When his parents died, William and Anna revived their plan of moving to Cumbria. Then came the shock of Brexit geographically splitting his extended family. William was so angry that he resolved never to write another word in English. Instead he published his next novel “Bribes d’une Identité Perdue” in French under the name of Guillaume Dubois.

The move to their dream village in Cumbria produced another shock: Anna’s unexpected death. This was followed by the Covid epidemic and the resulting isolation. William sought solace in writing (in English again) the stories in this new book. They all take place in and around the Eden Valley, beginning with events that happened, or might have happened, during the epidemic. They continue right up to the present day. There is satire and humour, sadness and sorrow, wry observations and longer, serious tales. All of it is fictional, the product of William’s imagination. Whether the reader knows Cumbria or lives on another continent (even in long lost Europe) they will find these stories entertaining and perhaps thought-provoking.

William explains….

The precise location of that village in the Eden Valley is one secret I shall not reveal, but what I hasten to make clear is that the village in the book, and the characters who inhabit it, are fictional. Any reader who strays into my real village will not find them here.

The only common feature is my ocularium, a raised patio which, in my fictional village I have placed in a corner of David’s garden, overlooking the river and the village green. When the weather is fine one can sit there and observe the heron fishing, the sheep crossing the footbridge, children playing in the water and the people walking their dogs. Strictly speaking an ocularium is the part of a daddy longlegs’ body that houses its several eyes. Its lookout, if you will.

Please message me to order copies for delivery outside the UK.

Also by William Wood….