The triumphant new novel from the Walter Scott Prize-winning author of The Gallows Pole and The Offing
Benjamin Myers was born in Durham in 1976. He is the author of ten books, including The Offing, which was an international bestseller and selected for the Radio 2 Book Club; The Gallows Pole, which won the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction and has been adapted as a BBC series by Shane Meadows; Beastings which was awarded the Portico Prize for Literature, and Pig Iron which won the inaugural Gordon Burn Prize. He has also published non-fiction, poetry and crime novels and his journalism has appeared in publications including the Guardian, New Statesman, TLS, Caught by the River and many more. He lives in the Upper Calder Valley, West Yorkshire. benjaminmyerswriter.com / @BenMyers1
It’s been a while since I’ve reacted as emotionally to a novel ...
An epic the north has long deserved: ambitious, dreamy, earthy,
dark, welcoming and not ... There are readers like me who will not
just enjoy this book but feel deeply grateful for its existence
*FINANCIAL TIMES*
A polyphonic hymn to a very specific landscape and its people. At
the same time, it deepens his standing as an arresting chronicler
of a broader, more mysterious seam of ancient folklore that unites
the history of these isles as it’s rarely taught
*OBSERVER*
Myers is maturing into a serious writer rather than just a sombre
one. Cuddy is an ambitious and accomplished novel that shows it’s
not — necessarily — grim up north
*THE TIMES*
A bold novel that whirls us through a dizzying range of poetic and
prosaic styles
*Daily Telegraph, The 75 best books for summer 2023*
There’s much to enjoy in the novel’s linguistic beauty ... Cuddy
explores the endurance of goodness and grace
*SPECTATOR*
A sensational piece of storytelling … The symbiosis of poetry and
story, of knowledge and deep love, marks out Cuddy as a singular
and significant achievement
*GUARDIAN*
Mesmerising, lyrical ... Stands in a genre of its own ... Serves as
a reminder that we are but custodians of a world we inherited.
Cuddy cements Myers’s standing as one of our finest, and most
deftly imaginative, writers
*I NEWS*
Myers traces … the manifold threads of history to remarkable
effect
*IRISH TIMES*
The cathedral is a wonder … in its elegance and grotesquery, its
shimmering and its solidity, Myers captures it accurately. Indeed,
that could be a description of his book
*SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY*
As a work of literature and as a tribute to a man and his region,
it will endure
*INDEPENDENT.CO.UK*
Marvellous, artful, enchanted ... With power and pathos, this novel
follows the cult of St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne from the 7th century
to the present day
*DAILY TELEGRAPH*
Brave, bold and brilliantly alive, Cuddy calls forth the voices and
the places of the north in a kaleidoscopic portrait through time.
Myers at his best: dark, sharp, earthy and superbly funny. Cuddy
isn’t a novel, it’s an invocation
*ROB COWEN, author of Common Ground*
Spare, poetic, haunting, tenderly observed ... Myers is a natural
storyteller ... [with] a poetic sensibility, and as a writer he
enjoys the snap and crunch of words, and the way they can summon an
atmosphere
*PROSPECT*
A wonder ... An accomplished and very moving novel
*SCOTSMAN*
Incorporates poetry, prose, play, diary and real historical
accounts to create a novel like no other
*NORTHERN LIFE*
Myers employs competing voices and different literary styles to
pull together an ephemeral yet somehow tangible narrative that is
both sweeping in its history and arresting in its style
*YORKSHIRE LIFE*
Myers chisels a cohesive and engaging portrait of a place laden
with history
*TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT*
An absorbingly beautiful book ... There aren't many writers as
attuned to the present state of this country and the history and
landscape that made it as Myers, who succeeds repeatedly in
harnessing time with compassion, kindness and a rare gift for
finding the right voice for the right people in the right era
*NEW EUROPEAN*
Cuddy is a work of art. Ben Myers has pulled off a kind of magic
trick ... Daring, expansive and deeply satisfying, Cuddy is a truly
original piece of writing which weaves a special kind of magic. I
was left completely spellbound. I loved every minute of this
dazzling and deeply original novel
*CLOVER STROUD, author of The Red of My Blood*
Once again Ben Myers has built another time machine in words and I
thoroughly enjoyed being humped around early medieval northern
England alongside St Cuthbert's holy corpse via centuries of
fisticuffs and up Durham Cathedrals tower to a sensitive take on
issues of our own time. Most of all I appreciated how Myers
explores faith and belief without the usual eyeroll and cynicism of
our excessively secular age – I feel St Cuthbert's monks and masons
looking down through history with a certain sense of pride
*LUKE TURNER, author of Out of the Woods*
Cuddy is another milestone marking Myers’ versatility as a
writer
*BUZZ*
Rich, rewarding, dark and comic, Cuddy is, like that cathedral, a
magnificent construction
*BUZZMAG*
To be able to move from the Dark Ages, to the Middle Ages, to the
Victorian Era to Modern Times and so ably capture the zeitgeist of
each is a rare feat of imagination
*GABRIELLE DRAKE*
Praise for Benjamin Myers: A writer of extraordinary and
incandescent talent
*ALEX PRESTON*
A genre-melding experimental novel
*GUARDIAN, Best Books of 2023*
Here is a strong, spiritual writer who sees and loves every
dewdrop, old oak, soft little animal and buried sword, and offers
them up to us like the precious treasures they are
*THE TIMES*
No one writes about the atmosphere, beauty and brutality of the
English countryside better than Benjamin Myers. And it's hard to
think of many people who can write with such attentiveness,
tenderness and force about the importance of human connection and
the redemptive power of art
*WENDY ERSKINE*
One of the most interesting, restless writers of his generation
*DAILY MAIL*
No one writes about the atmosphere, beauty and brutality of the
English countryside better than Ben Myers. And it's hard to think
of many people who can write with with such attentiveness,
tenderness and force about the importance of human connection and
the redemptive power of art
*WENDY ERSKINE*
Shot through with a romantic, even mystical radicalism of the kind
that William Blake would have approved of
*DAILY TELEGRAPH*
What a radical thing, these days, to have written a book so full of
warmth and kindness ... Gorgeous
*MAX PORTER*
Benjamin Myers is fast making the contested boundary between
history and folklore his own
*JOHN MITCHINSON*
A powerful new voice
*GUARDIAN*
Book by book, over the past decade, Ben Myers has proved himself to
be one of the most singular, moving and crucial voices of our
times
*DAVID PEACE*
A draft of cool, clear water ... He’s such a good and brave
writer
*MONOCLE*
Benjamin Myers is fast making the contested boundary between
history and folklore his own
*JOHN MITCHINSON*
Powerful and moving
*LITERARY REVIEW*
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