Cuddy

There’s much to enjoy in the novel’s linguistic beauty ... Cuddy explores the endurance of goodness and grace

SPECTATOR

A sensational piece of storytelling … The symbiosis of poetry and story, of knowledge and deep love, marks out Cuddy as a singular and significant achievement

GUARDIAN

Mesmerising, lyrical ... Stands in a genre of its own ... Serves 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

I NEWS

Myers traces … the manifold threads of history to remarkable effect

IRISH TIMES

The cathedral is a wonder … in its elegance and grotesquery, its shimmering and its solidity, Myers captures it accurately. Indeed, that could be a description of his book

SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY

As a work of literature and as a tribute to a man and his region, it will endure

INDEPENDENT.CO.UK

Marvellous, artful, enchanted ... With power and pathos, this novel follows the cult of St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne from the 7th century to the present day

DAILY TELEGRAPH

Brave, bold and brilliantly alive, Cuddy calls forth the voices and the places of the north in a kaleidoscopic portrait through time. Myers at his best: dark, sharp, earthy and superbly funny. Cuddy isn’t a novel, it’s an invocation

ROB COWEN, author of Common Ground

Spare, poetic, haunting, tenderly observed ... Myers is a natural storyteller ... [with] a poetic sensibility, and as a writer he enjoys the snap and crunch of words, and the way they can summon an atmosphere

PROSPECT

A wonder ... An accomplished and very moving novel

SCOTSMAN

Myers chisels a cohesive and engaging portrait of a place laden with history

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

An absorbingly beautiful book ... There aren't many writers as attuned to the present state of this country and the history and landscape that made it as Myers, who succeeds repeatedly in harnessing time with compassion, kindness and a rare gift for finding the right voice for the right people in the right era

NEW EUROPEAN

Cuddy is a work of art. Ben Myers has pulled off a kind of magic trick ... Daring, expansive and deeply satisfying, Cuddy is a truly original piece of writing which weaves a special kind of magic. I was left completely spellbound. I loved every minute of this dazzling and deeply original novel

CLOVER STROUD, author of The Red of My Blood

Once again Ben Myers has built another time machine in words and I thoroughly enjoyed being humped around early medieval northern England alongside St Cuthbert's holy corpse via centuries of fisticuffs and up Durham Cathedrals tower to a sensitive take on issues of our own time. Most of all I appreciated how Myers explores faith and belief without the usual eyeroll and cynicism of our excessively secular age – I feel St Cuthbert's monks and masons looking down through history with a certain sense of pride

LUKE TURNER, author of Out of the Woods

Cuddy is another milestone marking Myers’ versatility as a writer

BUZZ

Rich, rewarding, dark and comic, Cuddy is, like that cathedral, a magnificent construction

BUZZMAG

To be able to move from the Dark Ages, to the Middle Ages, to the Victorian Era to Modern Times and so ably capture the zeitgeist of each is a rare feat of imagination

GABRIELLE DRAKE

Praise for Benjamin Myers: A writer of extraordinary and incandescent talent

ALEX PRESTON

A genre-melding experimental novel

GUARDIAN, Best Books of 2023

Here is a strong, spiritual writer who sees and loves every dewdrop, old oak, soft little animal and buried sword, and offers them up to us like the precious treasures they are

THE TIMES

No one writes about the atmosphere, beauty and brutality of the English countryside better than Benjamin Myers. And it's hard to think of many people who can write with such attentiveness, tenderness and force about the importance of human connection and the redemptive power of art

WENDY ERSKINE

One of the most interesting, restless writers of his generation

DAILY MAIL

No one writes about the atmosphere, beauty and brutality of the English countryside better than Ben Myers. And it's hard to think of many people who can write with with such attentiveness, tenderness and force about the importance of human connection and the redemptive power of art

WENDY ERSKINE

Shot through with a romantic, even mystical radicalism of the kind that William Blake would have approved of

DAILY TELEGRAPH

What a radical thing, these days, to have written a book so full of warmth and kindness ... Gorgeous

MAX PORTER

Benjamin Myers is fast making the contested boundary between history and folklore his own

JOHN MITCHINSON

A powerful new voice

GUARDIAN

Book by book, over the past decade, Ben Myers has proved himself to be one of the most singular, moving and crucial voices of our times

DAVID PEACE

A draft of cool, clear water ... He’s such a good and brave writer

MONOCLE

Powerful and moving

LITERARY REVIEW