Benjamin Myers

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.

Cuddy is a bold and experimental retelling of the story of the hermit St. Cuthbert, unofficial patron saint of the North of England.

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.

Along the way we meet brewers and masons, archers and academics, monks and labourers, their visionary voices and stories echoing through their ancestors and down the ages.

And all the while at the centre sits Durham Cathedral and the lives of those who live and work around this place of pilgrimage – their dreams, desires, connections and communities.

In Male Tears, a debut collection of stories that brings together over fifteen years of work, Benjamin Myers lays bare the male psyche in all its fragility, complexity and failure, its hubris and forbidden tenderness. Farmers, fairground workers and wandering pilgrims, gruesome gamekeepers, bare-knuckle boxers and ex-cons with secret passions, the men that populate these unsettling, wild and wistful stories form a multi-faceted, era-spanning portrait of just what it means to be a man.

One summer following the Second World War, Robert Appleyard sets out on foot from his Durham village. Sixteen and the son of a coal miner, he makes his way across the northern countryside until he reaches the former smuggling village of Robin Hood's Bay. There he meets Dulcie, an eccentric, worldly, older woman who lives in a ramshackle cottage facing out to sea. Staying with Dulcie, Robert's life opens into one of rich food, sea-swimming, sunburn and poetry.

The two come from different worlds, yet as the summer months pass, they form an unlikely friendship that will profoundly alter their futures.

England, 1989. Over the course of a burning hot summer, two very different men - traumatized Falklands veteran Calvert, and affable, chaotic Redbone - set out nightly in a clapped-out camper van to undertake an extraordinary project.

Under cover of darkness, the two men traverse the fields of rural England in secret, forming crop circles in elaborate and mysterious patterns. As the summer wears on, and their designs grow ever more ambitious, the two men find that their work has become a cult international sensation - and that an unlikely and beautiful friendship has taken root as the wheat ripens from green to gold.

Moving and exhilarating, The Perfect Golden Circle is a captivating novel about the futility of war, the destruction of the English countryside, class inequality - and the power of beauty to heal trauma and fight power.

John-John wants to escape his past. But the legacy of brutality left by his boxer father, King of the Gypsies, Mac Wisdom, overshadows his life. His new job as an ice cream man should offer freedom, but instead pulls him into the dark recesses of a northern town where his family name is mud.

When he attempts to trade prejudice and parole officers for the solace of the rural landscape, Mac's bloody downfall threatens John-John's very survival.

Dinah has always lived in Scarborough. Trapped with her feckless husband and useless son, her one release comes at her town’s Northern Soul nights, where she gets to put on her best and lose herself in the classics.

Dinah has an especial hero: Bucky Bronco, who recorded a string of soul gems in the late Sixties and then vanished off the face of the earth. When she manages to contact Bucky she can’t believe her luck.

Over in Chicago, Bucky Bronco is down on his luck – and has been since the loss of his beloved wife Maybelle. The best he can hope for is to make ends meet, and try and stay high.

But then an unexpected invitation arrives, from someone he’s never met, to come to somewhere he’s never heard of. With nothing to lose – and in need of the cash – Bucky boards a plane...

As autumn draws in, a series of unexplained vicious attacks occur in a small northern town renowned for being a bohemian backwater. As the national media descends, local journalist Roddy Mace attempts to tell the story, but finds the very nature of truth brought into question. He turns to disgraced detective James Brindle for help. When further attacks occur the shattered community becomes the focus of an accelerating media that favours immediacy over truth. Murder and myth collide in a folk-crime story about place, identity and the tangled lives of those who never leave.

In the depths of winter in an isolated Yorkshire hamlet, a teenage girl, Melanie Muncy, is missing. DI Jim Brindle may be obsessive, taciturn and solitary, but nobody on the force is more relentless in pursuing justice.

Local journalist Roddy Mace has sacrificed a high-flying career as a reporter in London to take up a role with the local newspaper. For him the Muncy case offers the chance of redemption.

On a farm high above the hamlet, Steven Rutter, a destitute loner, harbours secrets that will shock even the hardened Brindle. As Brindle and Mace begin to prise the secrets of the case from the tight-lipped locals, their investigation leads first to the pillars of the community and finally to a local celebrity who has his own hiding places, and his own dark tastes.