Racing the Wind

This powerful and beautifully-written account is the memoir of Patricia Nolan who lived in a tiny community in Cumbria and it captures the end of an era in the 1950s. 'When the first organ-transplant was taking place, when computers were starting to revolutionise our lives and television was arriving in the sitting-rooms of Britain, in my house we were still dipping buckets into a stream to make a cup of tea and going to bed by candlelight,' she writes. The tale covers three years of the author's life, made particularly vivid by a traumatic event which opens the book, but which goes on to depict a poor but close rural community with its village school, its annual country show, its Christmas celebrations and its local characters - all set against the dramatic back-drop of Scafell and the surrounding hills and moors on which she and her friends ran free.

Patricia Nolan, published poet and novelist, was born in Cumbria and attended her local village school of Boot before being awarded a scholarship to Keswick School. Her mother ran the little Boot post office. Patricia's career was in teaching and she now lives in Belsize Park, London. She served as a Justice of the Peace for a decade at Willesden Magistrates Court.