The book is told in single stories that make a whole - each section has a different format and style, and different characters.

We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. 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. I also visited Durham and Lindisfarne last month and always love a setting-driven story and was curious about the central St Cuthbert. I’ve been reading his novels over the past few years and there’s something different, from the tender relationship in The Offing , the working class narrative of Pig Iron and medieval coin counterfeiters of The Gallows Pole.

He is most definitely in a class of his own and I can't wait to see where his writing takes me next. The pacing, sense of place and period, and the personal stories of its protagonists in Cuddy grip from the beginning and keep a firm hold right through its 400+ pages. But the book’s highlight by some margin is the final novel, set in the present day, a moving meditation on familial love, caring for a parent with a terminal illness, zero-hours contracts, social mobility, particularly the area of cultural capital, and on religious faith. The story of Saint Cuthbert, ‘the patron saint of Northern England’ is told through the experiences of a tenth century orphan, Ediva, who is travelling with a band of monks on their long journey with Cuddy’s corpse at the time of the Viking raids, the abused wife of a violent Durham stonemason in the fourteenth century, an Oxford historian straight out of an M R James story attending the opening of Cuthbert’s tomb in Durham Cathedral in 1827 (this section I found less convincing than the others and one particular glaring anachronism served to underline that the narrative voice here wasn’t quite believable) and Michael Cuthbert, a labourer working on the cathedral in 2019.

If I was reading those preceding paragraphs, and without prior knowledge, I might be a little unsure, however let me assure you Cuddy really is something very special, vital and ultimately it's a very accessible and human novel. The novel is divided into four "books", each of which follows a different character in a different century, but all characters have a connection with St. Cuddy is a novel that combines poetry, prose, diary entries and real historical accounts to relate the story of St.The north to me has always appeared a land of coughing chimneys, blotched babies, vile ale, wet wool and cloying clouds, where all is coated with a slick of grime, a skein of grease, and such concepts as aspiration, education and betterment extend to an extra pan-load of dripping of a week's end.

If all of this sounds too heady or terribly uninteresting, there is good news: The five narratives which contribute to the book's overarching story are excellent. Loyal monks and shifting bands of followers conveyed Cuthbert’s coffin to Chester-le-Street, where it remained until 995, when Viking invaders again made it necessary to move it to safety. The 440 page novel is broken down into 4 distinct sections that tell their story in a different narrative style and seemingly bear no relation to each other in terms of sharing characters, form, prose, setting and time period. There was some real skill in the period writing, but the final section a) needed editing, it was flabby, and b) was directionless, and this in turn, made me wonder what the point of the whole was meant to be. The final part of the novel, Daft Lad, brings us at last to the present, or rather the very recent past of 2019.

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 defined by class and austerity. From these seeds of historical truth and strange mythology, Benjamin Myers spins an unforgettable story of love and loss that breaks free of realism, entering a thrilling space both hilarious and terrifying. In fact, most of Cuthbert’s story takes place after his death, when he is exhumed and moved to safety.