Audiobook: Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town

Known as the Canadian Mark Twain, Stephen Leacock was a humorist whose gentle parodies and spoofs still evoke a smile and a chuckle more than a hundred years after they were first published.

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town was published in 1912. Set in the fictional town of Mariposa in Canada, which is peopled by a delightful assortment of characters, the book has proved to be an enduring classic in the humor genre.

Readers around the world continue to enjoy these little stories about the inhabitants of Mariposa because Leacock portrays people whom we have all met at some time or the other in our own lives. The universal appeal of Sunshine Sketches… lies in the amusing situations that Mariposans find themselves in and their exaggerated sense of their own self-importance! Characters like John Smith, the owner of the town’s only hotel, Golgotha Gingham the undertaker, Henry Mullins the pompous manager of the Mariposa Exchange Bank, the giddy-headed Zena Pepperleigh whose love of romantic novels leads her into all kinds of conundrums and the bashful Peter Pupkin who loves her from afar and many others provide hours of amusement and fun for young and old readers alike.

The book has been twice adapted for television and has become a very successful mini-series on CBC. Radio and stage adaptations round the world have made the little town of Mariposa familiar to people everywhere. Leacock himself recounts that Mariposa is based on some eighty or ninety small towns across America and Canada and the characters are composites of people he met throughout his career as a teacher, political scientist and author. He first began writing as a student when he contributed short sketches to local journals.

Sunshine Sketches… is indeed a delightful addition to your bookshelf!