JOSH LAWTON charts the rites of passage of a young Cumbrian who falls in love, marries, fathers a child and is then betrayed - a betrayal that is both inevitable and shocking. Moving with deftness from scene to scene and character to character the novel ends in a tragedy that becomes both a warning against simplicity and a cry for its presence in everything. And throughout, one of the strongest characters remains the landscape against which the drama is played out - the Cumberland that Melvyn Bragg knows so well and describes so evocatively.