Michael Cuthbert’s connection with the landscape is of an intensity we might expect from a character in an Alan Garner novel. Forbes Fawcett-Black resembles those unfortunate scholars dreamed up by MR James, whose much verbalised confidence in the scientific pursuit of knowledge is no defence against the darker forces they have dismissed as superstition. Fame” would have been anathema to him as he lived a very simple, austere life and died alone on a rock in the North Sea. If all of this sounds too heady or terribly uninteresting, there is good news: The five narratives which contribute to the book's overarching story are excellent.

The latter aspects was one of the book’s highlights for me, but the prose poetry it’s weakest element, albeit one that put Cuddy in dialogue with Letty McHugh’s brilliant Barbellion Prize winning The Book of Hours. In fact, most of Cuthbert’s story takes place after his death, when he is exhumed and moved to safety.

It is poetry and prose, fact and fiction, passionate and discursive: a dash through over a thousand years of history. After an off-the-books job removing old asbestos, Michael is offered a stint of lifting and carrying at Durham Cathedral, where his personal history and unconscious heritage combine to open his eyes to a world that has previously seemed closed to him. 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. I found his earlier novels rather bleak, but he then wrote The Offing, a wonderfully sensitive coming-of-age novel set on the Yorkshire coast.

It was particularly satisfying that the main POV character is a female disciple named Ediva, a foundling who had visions, including of the church where Cuthbert would finally be buried after centuries of nomadism. He has also published non-fiction, poetry and crime novels and his journalism has appeared in publications including the Guardian , New Statesman , TLS, Caught by the River and many more. There is much more that could be said, but there are plenty of good detailed reviews available already, and I would encourage those who haven't read it to give it a chance. But, they are of course linked by a shared sense of place and a history which ultimately binds them together, if not as seamlessly as one might expect. But I can recognise that this is a step up from what Myers has written before, and that it will bring him to the attention of people who perhaps haven't read his work before.He is the author of ten books, including The Offing , which was an international bestseller and selected for the Radio 2 Book Club; The Gallows Pole , which won the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction and has been adapted as a BBC series by Shane Meadows; Beastings which was awarded the Portico Prize for Literature, and Pig Iron which won the inaugural Gordon Burn Prize. Loyal monks and shifting bands of followers conveyed Cuthbert’s coffin to Chester-le-Street, where it remained until 995, when Viking invaders again made it necessary to move it to safety. I just adore discovering a book that is so perfect that I keep stopping to enjoy perfectly composed sentences . Section 2, a stream of consciousness novella about an affair after the building of Durham Cathedral, I enjoyed.