Cuddy

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The other five shortlisted books were Lori & Joe by Amy Arnold, The Long Form by Kate Briggs, Never Was by H Gareth Gavin, Man-Eating Typewriter by Richard Milward and The Future Future by Adam Thirlwell. The stories we tell one another are all that shall remain when time dies and even the strongest sculpted stones crumble to sand." Cuddy closes in the class-ridden, austerity-riven 21st century with Michael, a 19-year-old labourer, who joins a team repairing a cathedral balustrade while caring for his terminally ill mother. As Michael comes to realise, he too is part of a never-ending history, “one more link in a chain of people … a continuum”. Throughout, that interconnectedness is underscored by homely motifs in the form of apples and stews, and by the unsettling gaze of a pair of owl-like eyes.

Myers wins Goldsmiths Prize for Cuddy". Books+Publishing. 9 November 2023 . Retrieved 9 November 2023. The aforementioned AD1827 section provides comic relief in the form of a rather caricatured academic snob from The Other Place (although it neatly twists into an effective Victorian ghost story): 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.

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Several more sections follow in which we follow a young girl with her visions of a cathedral and her visitations from Cuthbert (AD995); we live in the shadow of that cathedral (Durham cathedral as we know it) with a woman (AD1346) whose husband is a famous archer but is also abusive and she falls for another, more gentle, man; we read the journal of an Oxford antiquarian (AD1827) as he travels to the north of England (which he despises) to witness the disinterment of a body in the cathedral; and we follow Michael Cuthbert in AD2019 as he cares for his mother and scratches a living as a labourer, eventually finding more stable work at the cathedral. Cuddy, Benjamin Myers’s bewitching tenth novel, starts with a short history lesson about St Cuthbert, a 7th-century shepherd boy who became a monk after experiencing a vision. He died as Bishop of Lindisfarne in 687 on the even more remote island of Inner Farne, off the Northumbrian coast. Today, his remains lie in a shrine in Durham Cathedral, which was founded in his honour in 1093 and draws 700,000 visitors a year.

As the book moves from 687 to 2019 in centuries-long leaps, there are less obvious themes which run throughout. Where does one find inspiration, and why are some sources more powerful than others? Is the distance between the sacred and the profane really so great? When is historical inquiry illuminating, and are there times one should simply "let his story lie" undisturbed? Myers is particularly fascinated by the journey of self-discovery that is the birthright of each person. And his personal love for the natural world allows for some truly vivid scene-setting. Writing Durham: Ben Myers. 7 August 2019. Archived from the original on 22 December 2021 . Retrieved 7 August 2019. Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin, because it’s near-perfect, and Ask Dr Mueller: The Writings of Cookie Mueller because it contains dirt, humour and wisdom. The Revd Dr Sarah Foot is Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the University of Oxford, and Dean Designate.

I found the poetry of Thomas Hardy to be dismal and the prose of DH Lawrence to be overwrought – all those exclamation marks. Expressing this was probably the reason I failed A-level English. But I now recognise both as visionaries who saw far beyond the England they occupied. I particularly admire Lawrence’s novellas, The Fox and The Virgin and the Gypsy. The Goldsmiths Prize awards fiction that “breaks the mould”. To achieve true inventiveness, a great novel must also craft its own form. The winner of this year’s prize, which I judged alongside Tom Lee of Goldsmiths University and the novelists Maddie Mortimer and Helen Oyeyemi, does just that – four times over.

I just adore discovering a book that is so perfect that I keep stopping to enjoy perfectly composed sentences .This is why I read so much .I read lots and lots of 4 star really good books but for me the joy is finding the 5 star ones .Cuddy is one of these books it is a perfectly crafted beautifully poetic book of loveliness . Myers’ lyrical book, which took almost five years to write, stands in a genre of its own. Its constant links of place and Cuthbert’s legacy do more than adhere each section into a novel: they serve as a reminder that we are but custodians of a world we inherited. Cuddy cements Myers’s standing as one of our finest, and most deftly imaginative, writers. From life in a brutal eighteenth-century coiners gang ( The Gallows Pole) to a late 1980s public obsession with crop circles ( The Perfect Golden Circle); where do you get your limitless inspiration from? Benjamin Myers has long made the stories of northern England his own: The Offing (2019) renders the region as a nation, apart and distinct; The Gallows Pole (2017) tells a bleak tale of injustice in 18th-century Yorkshire. Cuddy continues this journey of exploration, but now the form is more experimental and the writing more incantatory, as Myers traces just some of the manifold threads of history to remarkable effect. Neil Hegarty There's no doubt thatCuddy is a bold and experimental retelling of the story of the hermit St. Cuthbert, unofficial patron saint of the North of England.