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Posted 20 hours ago

Cuddy

£9.9£99Clearance
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Published by Bluemoose Books, it won the inaugural Gordon Burn Prize [8] and was longlisted for 3:AM Magazine. I'm a very traditional reader who likes nice lineal stories, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, but despite its novel approach in Book 1, I could not put this one down. Myers' novel The Gallows Pole (2017), based on the true story of the Cragg Vale Coiners, received a Roger Deakin Award and won the 2018 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction. Pig Iron (2012) was set in the traveller/gypsy community of the north-east of England and was the first to be published under his full name Benjamin Myers.

Remember, if you vote for a book and it wins, you are implicitly promising to read the book and participate in the discussion (the penalty for not following through is one month's harassment by online 21st Century Lit chat bots). But Myers has not written about Cuddy, to use the nickname bestowed on the North of England’s unofficial saint, so much as Cuddy’s enduring influence. Yet Cuthbert himself had no connection with Durham; indeed, he probably never visited “Dunholme”, the uninhabited hill surrounded on three sides by a deep river gorge where his remains now rest. The first, in poetic form, follows the “haliwerfolc” who wandered the north for a century after St Cuthbert’s death in 687, devoutly protecting his body from Viking raiders; the second is a potent tale of forbidden desire and revenge set in 1346; the third comprises the diary entries of a pompous, sneering Victorian academic summoned from Oxford to attend one of the many exhumations of Cuddy’s corpse; and the fourth paints a poignant contemporary portrait of austerity Britain and escaping the daily grind.The ever present Cuddy throughout the novel and the different characters which then interlink to tell the story of Durham was a really interesting narrative device. It's about centuries ticking past and how stories are told and passed down, how mystical the human experience really is.

In Book I, Cuddy, the dead saint, speaks to Ediva, a young woman adopted by the haliwerfolc, the “people of the saint” as their cook and helper.

Myers explores several topics, many of them quite obvious: the difference between faith and religion, the cost of true devotion, and the interplay between Art and Science. 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.

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