Beastings

"Beastings is a brilliant, brutal novel, told sparsely but with huge strength. It put me in mind of the work of Ron Rash and Cormac McCarthy in its attention to landscape, and its muscular tone." - Robert Macfarlane

"The evocation of landscape is intimate and elemental...Myers has the potential to become a true tragedian of the fells." - The Guardian

"Benjamin 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." - Judge Sarah Hall, Northern Writers' Award

"This bitter, alarming, occasionally visionary novel of the British wilderness is likely to linger in the mind for some time." - New Statesman

"Beastings is just wonderful - tough and generous and beautiful" - Will Atkins, author of The Moor: Lives Landscape Literature

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 abducts a child, a local priest and poacher are 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 along the way.

Like 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.

Winner of the Northern Writers' Award.

"A bleak, compelling novel about religion, fertility and ferality, played out amongst the Lake District fells where the line between (wo)man and beast often seems fragile and thin...I don't 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

"Myers' prose is appropriately sparse...his brief descriptions need no expansion - "thin lipped with sharp manicured nails" - and he provokes a physical repulsion from the outset as he sets up a savage pursuit." - The Big Issue

"In his latest novel, Benjamin Myers quite literally takes us for a walk on the dark side...The description of the landscape is at times so intense and vivid, it breathes on the page. However, Beastings is not for the faint-hearted, the book is at times genuinely unsettling as Myers' rich descriptive prose leads us willingly into the heart of a gothic nightmare. A story that will grip you to the final word and a tour de force for Myers."

- Loud & Quiet magazine

"One for Cormac McCarthy fans tired of waiting for his new book..." - Shortlist

"Beastings is a startlingly confident novel, the kind that makes other books seem two-thirds too long..." - The Journal

"As the tension of the chase heightens and the novel races towards its terrible conclusion, it's Myers's powerful and uncompromising language that keeps the reader gripped - at once sumptuous and stark, horrific and intense - Beastings is a novel of unflinching beauty, telling a richly imagined tale of a need from freedom from the abuse of power that can resonate in us all." - NARC magazine

"...the novel keeps its hand around your throat, dragging you backward through the overgrowth it depicts. By the time you finish the book, you'll feel simultaneously compelled to visit the Lake District and terrified by the idea." - Bookslut

"Benjamin Myers' highly anticipated fourth book seals his reputation as a writer with a talent for painting the violent wilderness of the rural north.... fans of his previous works will be on familiar ground with the novel's mesmerising prose and blackly humorous, laconic dialogue, and the damp and desolate landscapes of the novel are given immense tangibility and personality." - Living North

"One for Cormac McCarthy fans tired of waiting for his new book" - Shortlist

"A dark, suspenseful Lakeland gothic - a real literary page-turner," - Jenn Ashworth

"An absorbing story of a savage pursuit..." - Big Issue

"What I love about Myers' writing is the simplicity of what is going on. There are no gadgets and bullshit....the writing in Beastings, as with Pig Iron and the gorgeous novella Snorri & Frosti, is completely stripped back of any fancy pants bullshit and is primal and uninhibited." - Bookc—t

"I don't think it's any exaggeration to say that Beastings is an absolute masterpiece. A spellbinding work of art." - Russ Litten

"The language of Beastings is unembellished; deceptively spare for the most part, yet obviously painstakingly crafted...this pitch-black tale surely mark Myers' continued ascendancy as a contemporary novelist of note; despite, or perhaps because of it bleakness, Beastings is a deeply compelling and unnerving piece of prose." - Cuckoo Review

"With Beastings Myers is becoming a Ron Rash of northern England. Like Rash's novels, and short stories of the Appalachian mountains, Myers' depiction of life on the Cumbrian fells spans Biblical struggles between innocence and corruption, sacrifice and love and a sense of an evil that will always exist within the human soul." - Bookmunch