Cuddy

Product Information

Myers, Benjamin (3 January 2020). " 'I was half-insane with anxiety': how I wrote myself into a breakdown". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 3 January 2020– via www.theguardian.com. The third part takes place in the 1800’s and concerns two academics who attempt to exhume St. Cuthbert’s corpse. There’s a bit of fantastical element and it works. Charlesworth, Antonia (23 May 2022). "Radical and gently revolutionary". Big Issue North . Retrieved 16 July 2022.

So, overall, while I didn't like some parts, I always appreciated his trademark brilliant prose and, man, that first section is worth the cover price alone.The stories we tell one another are all that shall remain when time dies and even the strongest sculpted stones crumble to sand." Book two, The Mason’s Mark, carries us forward to 1346. Fletcher Bullard – champion archer, domestic abuser – is off fighting the Scots. When his wife, Eda, meets Francis Rolfe, one of a team of masons engaged in repairing and enhancing Durham Cathedral’s decorative stonework, what occurs will live on in the stone. But through all the changes the one voice that never leaves is that of the saintly Cuthbert who never quite seems to get his wish to be left alone to worship God. Myers takes a different narrative approach in each of the five sections (four major parts and one short interlude) and in fact each part is a separate story that could almost be read independently. The thread is St Cuthbert (affectionately known as Cuddy) who was declared a saint in the North of England in the late 600’s. His coffin was taken from Lindisfarne by a group of monks after the Danes invaded. These monks then travelled around the country for years before they settled in what is now known as Durham and the majestic Durham Cathedral was built to inter his coffin.

His novel Beastings (2014) won the Portico Prize For Literature and the Northern Writers' Award. It was also longlisted for the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize. In 2019 he was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters from York St John University. [24] Pig Iron (2012) was set in the traveller/gypsy community of the north-east of England and was the first to be published under his full name Benjamin Myers. Published by Bluemoose Books, it won the inaugural Gordon Burn Prize [8] and was longlisted for 3:AM Magazine.com's 'Novels of the Year' [9] and runner-up in The Guardian's 'Not The Booker Prize', [10] in the same year.Book four, an account from a visiting professor in 1827, who has no love of the uncultured north. He is there for the opening of Cuthbert’s tomb once more. This time the decorative casket that has held the saint’s body for eight hundred years is ruined. Myers has written this in the flamboyant wordy style of the period, catching the nuances effortlessly. You'd be right in being confused. I am still confused and I've finished it! But I can recognise that this is a step up from what Myers has written before, and that it will bring him to the attention of people who perhaps haven't read his work before. Cuddy is a return to epic historical fiction and it didn't surprise me to learn that this labour of love took several years in different locations to write. I imagine as a son of the area that Benjamin Myers grew up steeped in the Cuddy mythology.

The styles of the novels differ and each reader will likely find a different part appeals. The first section is perhaps the most innovative, with prose poetry mixed with a story told from attributed quotes from various sources, ancient and modern, on which Ben Myers has drawn. The latter aspects was one of the book’s highlights for me, but the prose poetry it’s weakest element, albeit one that put Cuddy in dialogue with Letty McHugh’s brilliant Barbellion Prize winning The Book of Hours. Cuddy is the ninth novel from Benjamin Myers, who was born in Durham and now lives in West Yorkshire. Its central character is St Cuthbert, the unofficial patron saint of the north of England. St Cuthbert was born in Northumbria, became a monk, rose to become abbot of Lindisfarne, and then lived for many years as a hermit. Cuddy, Myers’s eighth novel, is 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. Rating this a 3* read tells barely half the story. For a start, nothing about it is middling, or average. So perhaps even rating it all is a futile pursuit.

Church Times/Sarum College:

As a teenager Myers began writing for British weekly Melody Maker. [6] In 1997 he became their staff writer while residing in the Oval Mansions squat for several years. In 2011 he published an article, about his brief time as an intern at News of the World. [6] He has spoken about failing English Literature at A-level and being rejected by "more than a hundred" universities before being accepted by the University of Bedfordshire (formerly Luton University). [7] Work [ edit ] Journalism [ edit ]