Cuddy: Winner of the 2023 Goldsmiths Prize

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And the way that certain characters (eg an owl-eyed boy) and certain motifs (eg wild garlic) echo through the ages makes the sum greater than its sometimes flawed parts. There is much more that could be said, but there are plenty of good detailed reviews available already, and I would encourage those who haven't read it to give it a chance.

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. I admit I was a little daunted by the style when I first started but then Gallows Pole unnerved me to begin with. Women’s voices are at the forefront in the first two books, the last two focus on men who don’t have faith.

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. Section 1, a kind of epic poem telling the story of the Haliwerfolc, a group of dedicated monks and others who carried Cuddy's body around the north to help it avoid desecration by the invading vikings, is glorious.

Book 2 moves to 1346 and is set in and around the cathedral and its masons and tells the story of Eda and her violent husband who is an archer fighting the Scots. A set of stories from past to present with St Cuthbert (Cuddy) as a guiding presence in some way in each.

Daring, expansive and deeply satisfying, Cuddy is a truly original piece of writing which weaves a special kind of magic. Ediva is alive to the rhythms of the landscape in a way that marks her out as different; she also sees visions of the future cathedral – a building “bigger than anything man has ever built, so big it rears up like a mountain, like a great beast” – where the saint will finally be laid to rest. The final book is the story of Michael, a teenager labourer who in 2017 begins work at the cathedral among the repairs to the medieval masonry. It is probably Myers' most ambitious and experimental book (with the possible exception of The Gallows Pole) and it is a very enjoyable and stimulating read. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

It's about centuries ticking past and how stories are told and passed down, how mystical the human experience really is. 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. Myers has written this in the flamboyant wordy style of the period, catching the nuances effortlessly. I found it a little hard to get going with reading this as the mix of styles and forms used to move through the vast period of history covered in this retelling of the story and legacy of Saint Cuthbert from Lindisfarne to Dunhelm and Durham of today, was challenging- the last section is largely contemporary and very touching, and caused me to go back and re-read the earlier sections, and realise what an amazing success this book is - intentionally fitting form to content over the centuries. Just enough detail has been changed in real life locations that it annoys me, unable to tell if the author has done it deliberately or just didn't get it right in the first place.

Ediva’s narrative in book one dances off the page in a free-flowing, discursive stream, forever on the point of coalescing into more formal poetic structures. This first part is the story of the haliwerfolk, the people of the holy man, who accompanied the dead saint on his journey; the abbot and monks, the cook and the horse-boy.