These Darkening Days

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What to expect

Bloomsbury presents These Darkening Days by Benjamin Myers, read by Andrew Macintosh.

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.

Critics Review

As good as anything being written in Britain today

HORATIO CLARE

Layers of landscape, myth and the hidden underbelly of everyday life outside of the metropolis are built up as the plot unfolds and the darkness grows. By now you should all know how good a writer Myers is. If you don’t, These Darkening Days will be more than enough to convince you

LOUD & QUIET

A powerful novel by a writer who has found his subject and the voice that best expresses it … He could be Yorkshire’s Iain Sinclair as well as its Cormac McCarthy

BOOKMUNCH

Subtle and compelling, controlled and atmospheric – perfect, in fact, for the long dark nights ahead

MORNING STAR

He’s James Ellroy with a flat cap and a terrier

JOHN MITCHINSON

The collective blood pressure of the Yorkshire tourist board must ratchet up several notches every time that Myers publishes a new novel, but for the rest of us this is gripping stuff

THE CRACK

Everything here, from the now-familiar landscapes to the description of life at the local newspaper and the behaviour of parachuted-in Sun reporters, is note perfect…But the book goes much further, delving into society’s hysterical narcissism and the way its tendrils snake all the way back into myth, legend and half-forgotten community history. There’s no question that this is a superb piece of work….a fantastic eye for landscape and great political and cultural insight…it’s funny, brutal and properly thrilling

THRILL FILTER

The writing is stunning, from the occasional sentence which catches you and brings you up short – The streetlights wear soft halos in the mist – through to the ability to evoke the grittiness of this northern town in a few words. Sometimes I found myself going back and rereading sections, just for the pleasure the words gave. In places it’s almost poetic. And it’s all brilliant

BOOK BAG

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