Beastings

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Winner of the Portico Prize for Literature and the Northern Writers Award A brilliant, brutal novel ROBERT MACFARLANE 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 leaves the workhouse and abducts a child placed in her care, the local priest is 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. 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.

Reviews

Intimate and elemental Myers has the potential to become a true tragedian of the fells * Guardian *
This bitter, alarming, occasionally visionary novel of the British wilderness is likely to linger in the mind for some time * New Statesman *
Myers is quite simply an excellent and already accomplished writer. His prose is taut, confident, professionally polished but at the same time maintaining a sense of rustic and unrefined authenticity, that which is truly hewn -- Sarah Hall
I dont know if I have encountered such a strong, engaging character in a book for some time: this is startling, sublime writing * Caught by the River *
A story that will grip you to the final word and a tour de force * Loud & Quiet *
A gripping ride through an imagined heart of Lake District darkness. I couldn't have writ it better myself * Hamilton, British Sea Power *
Wonderful tough and generous and beautiful -- Will Atkins

Author Bio

Benjamin Myers was born in Durham in 1976. His novel The Gallows Pole received a Roger Deakin Award and won the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction. Beastings won the Portico Prize for Literature and Pig Iron won the Gordon Burn Prize, while Richard was a Sunday Times Book of the Year. He has also published poetry, crime novels and short fiction, while his journalism has appeared in publications including, among others, the Guardian, New Statesman, Caught by the River and New Scientist. He lives in the Upper Calder Valley, West Yorkshire. benmyers.com / @BenMyers1