Benjamin Myers - Free Library Land Online - Writing

The Perfect Golden Circle

Sun, 09 Jan 2022 00:11:57 +0200

“Nobody does troubled figures in a stunning landscape like Ben Myers. He’s a major force in the English novel and he gets better with every book.” Max Porter, author of Grief is The Thing With Feathers and Lanny

From a British literary sensation, the story of two rural outcasts and the crop circles they create over the course of a long, hot and very strange summer.

Summer 1989, rural England, the tail end of long decade of mass unemployment, class war and rebellion, and the continued destruction of the English countryside.
Over the course of a burning hot summer, two very different men - traumatized ex-soldier Calvert, and affable and chaotic Redbone - set out nightly in a decrepit camper van to undertake an extraordinary project. Under cover of darkness, the two men traverse the fields of rural England in secret, forming crop circles in...

Male Tears

Fri, 01 Oct 2021 00:05:20 +0300

'Cracking ... Richly distinctive stories, with unnerving, dark plotlines' Independent

'One of the most singular, moving and crucial voices of our times' David Peace
In Male Tears, a debut collection of stories that brings together over fifteen years of work, Benjamin Myers lays bare the male psyche in all its fragility, complexity and failure, its hubris and forbidden tenderness. Farmers, fairground workers and wandering pilgrims, gruesome gamekeepers, bare-knuckle boxers and ex-cons with secret passions, the men that populate these unsettling, wild and wistful stories form a multi-faceted, era-spanning portrait of just what it means to be a man.

The Offing

Mon, 18 Nov 2019 12:01:31 +0200

Cuddy

Tue, 16 May 2023 17:56:42 +0300

**Chosen as a book to watch out for in 2023 by The Times, Observer, Guardian, Irish TImes and Scotsman**

'An epic the north has long deserved' FINANCIAL TIMES
'A sensational piece of storytelling ... A singular and significant achievement' GUARDIAN
'Marvellous, artful, enchanted' DAILY TELEGRAPH

The triumphant new novel from the Walter Scott Prize-winning author of The Gallows Pole and The Offing

Cuddy is a bold and experimental retelling of the story of the hermit St. Cuthbert, unofficial patron saint of the North of England.
Incorporating poetry, prose, play, diary and real historical accounts to create a novel like no other, Cuddy straddles historical eras - from the first Christian-slaying Viking invaders of the holy island of Lindisfarne in the 8th century to a contemporary England...

The Gallows Pole

Tue, 28 Nov 2017 16:53:21 +0200

From his remote moorland home David Hartley assembles a gang of weavers and land workers to embark upon a criminal enterprise that will capsize the economy and become the biggest fraud in British history.They are the Cragg Vale Coiners and their business is clipping - the forging of coins, a treasonous offence punishable by death.

Turning Blue

Sun, 13 Nov 2016 21:05:37 +0200

The depths of winter in the isolated Yorkshire Dales and a teenage girl is missing.

Steven Rutter, a destitute loner, harbours secrets. Nobody knows the bleak moors better than him, or their hiding places.

Obsessive, taciturn and solitary, DS Brindle is relentless in pursuing justice. But he is not alone in his growing preoccupation with the case. Local journalist Roddy Mace has moved north from London to build a new life. Can this assignment be his redemption?

As Brindle and Mace begin to prise the secrets of the case from tight-lipped locals, their investigation leads first to the pillars of the community and finally to a local celebrity and fixture of the nation’s Saturday-night TV. ‘Lovely Larry’ Lister has his own hiding places, and his own dark tastes.

A tour de force of plotting and atmosphere, Turning Blue is a terrifying, gripping tale of hidden lives, and hidden deaths.

These Darkening Days (Mace & Brindle Book 2)

Mon, 13 Nov 2017 19:48:16 +0200

Beastings

Tue, 11 Nov 2014 14:11:16 +0200

A girl and a baby. A priest and a poacher. A savage pursuit through the landscape of a changing rural England. When a teenage girl abducts a child, a local priest and poacher are called upon to retrieve them. Chased through the Cumbrian mountains of a distant past, the girl fights starvation and the elements, encountering the hermits, farmers and hunters who occupy the remote hillside communities along the way. Like an American Southern Gothic tale set against the violent beauty of Northern England, BEASTINGS is a sparse and poetic novel about morality, motherhood and corruption.

Under the Rock

Tue, 09 Jan 2018 00:11:58 +0200

**Shortlisted for the Portico Prize 2019**

The astonishing new work of non-fiction from the prize-winning author of The Gallows Pole and The Offing

Under the Rock is about badgers, balsam, history, nettles, mythology, moorlands, mosses, poetry, bats, wild swimming, slugs, recession, floods, logging, peacocks, community, apples, asbestos, quarries, geology, industrial music, owls, stone walls, farming, anxiety, relocation, the North, woodpiles, folklore, landslides, ruins, terriers, woodlands, ravens, dales, valleys, walking, animal skulls, trespassing, crows, factories, maps, rain - lots of rain - and a great big rock.

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'Extraordinary, elemental ... never less than compelling: this is a wild, dark grimoire of a book' - TLS

'Exceptionally engaging ... beguiling ... this is a startling, unclassifiable book' - Stuart Kelly, The Scotsman

'Compelling...

Pig Iron

Sun, 11 Nov 2012 19:08:44 +0200

WINNER of THE 2013 GORDON BURN PRIZE. 'Brilliant.' The Guardian.' PIG IRON is the story of a traveller who hasn't travelled; a young man fighting for his surname and his very survival. "They knew of the Wisdoms. Everyone did. Travellers and country folk alike. Some said they'd been cursed with the wickedness since the days of Cromwell. Said it had made them all crooked and wiley, and they weren't to be trusted. Said they had the violence running through those generations like a coal seem in the northern soil. Some born daft, some born sneaky, but all of them surly and tough as pig iron."