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 leaves the workhouse and abducts a child placed in her care, the local priest is 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. 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.

Author Biography

His novel Beastings (2014) won the Portico Prize For Literature 2015, was the recipient of the Northern Writers' Award and longlisted for a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Award 2015. Widely acclaimed, it featured on several end of year lists, and was chosen by Robert Macfarlane in The Big Issue as one of his books of 2014.Pig Iron (2012) was the winner of the inaugural Gordon Burn Prize 2013 and runner-up in The Guardian's Not The Booker Prize. A controversial combination of biography and novel, Richard (2010) was a bestseller, and chosen as a Sunday Times book of the year.Myers' short story 'The Folk Song Singer' was awarded the Tom-Gallon Prize in 2014 by the Society Of Authors and published by Galley Beggar Press.As a journalist he has written about music, the arts and nature for publications including New Statesman, The Guardian, NME, Mojo, Time Out, New Scientist, Caught By The River, Record Collector, The Morning Star, Vice, The Quietus and many and others.Benjamin Myers was born in Durham, UK, in 1976. He currently lives in rural Yorkshire, UK