Lakeland Larks, Laughter and Lunacies

I took this book on holiday for a light hearted read and thoroughly enjoyed it. My husband heard me chuckling away time and time again. Anna has produced a funny, sometimes slightly irreverent, take on ‘life’ and the people and situations that she has encountered on her travels.

From the review published in North Lakes Living by the News Editor of The Keswick Reminder, Mike Addison. What a highly entertaining read this is – laugh-out-loud funny and with more amusing anecdotes than you can shake a stick at. The ebullient Anna Nolan has an engaging writing style, and you cannot fail to be enamoured by her wit, and her devil-may-care attitude certainly shines through in this book, which charts her escapades and mishaps on the Lakeland fells. Having cut her climbing teeth in Poland’s Tatra Mountains, Anna subsequently developed a deep love of the Lake District, completing all the Wainwright fells numerous times and leading a walking group for Skiddaw u3a. Anna’s highly humorous anecdotes and witty digressions are richly interspersed with comic verse, and you are virtually guaranteed a giggle on every page.

Lakeland Larks, Laughter and Lunacies - the book truly lives up to its title. Anna's explorations of the Lake District and humorous poems are very cleverly written and I was totally engrossed after each chapter, as to what would happen next. I highly recommend reading this book, as you can put it down, have a break and return to reading the book with the same enthusiasm. Can't wait for the sequel to be published.

This highly entertaining book is far more than an account of how Anna has climbed all of the Lake District peaks ten times. It is indeed partly biographical, but also contains numerous laugh-out-loud comic verses, not only about her hiking mishaps but also about new hips, Boris, Brexit, the NHS, being 70, Keswick, food, publishers, jabs etc. I am looking forward to the sequel which will be in bookshops later this year.

What a delight, a lighthearted tramp over Lakeland Fells, getting in and out of trouble in a most disarming way. Written by someone whose mother tongue isn’t English Anna Nolan displays an intimate knowledge of nuance and irony unknown to many native born people and her joy in using the idiosyncrasies of the language is apparent. Just the sort of book to pick up after a day on the hills and compare the author’s experiences with yours