Book three, The Corpse in the Cathedral, finds us in the company of a 19th-century Oxford professor, Forbes Fawcett-Black, invited to witness the opening of Cuthbert’s tomb. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.

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. The story of Saint Cuthbert, ‘the patron saint of Northern England’ is told through the experiences of a tenth century orphan, Ediva, who is travelling with a band of monks on their long journey with Cuddy’s corpse at the time of the Viking raids, the abused wife of a violent Durham stonemason in the fourteenth century, an Oxford historian straight out of an M R James story attending the opening of Cuthbert’s tomb in Durham Cathedral in 1827 (this section I found less convincing than the others and one particular glaring anachronism served to underline that the narrative voice here wasn’t quite believable) and Michael Cuthbert, a labourer working on the cathedral in 2019. 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. I knew nothing about St Cuthbert before reading the novel although I was vaguely aware of the Early Christian church and Lindesfarne.

Daring, expansive and deeply satisfying, Cuddy is a truly original piece of writing which weaves a special kind of magic. Telling the story of Saint Cuthbert and Durham Cathedral over the period of a thousand years, the author takes full advantage of all styles of writing be it poetry, prose , play script and the use of historical quotations. The increasingly serious turn taken by this chapter had the effect of removing my doubts, as well as shaking the professor’s loudly proclaimed contempt for the ineffable. The fact that I had visited many of the Northumberland settings, including Durham and Lindisfarne, in 2021, gave me a greater than average interest in this book, but I doubt many readers, other than those with a local connection, will have staying power. Cuthbert and his influence on the Christian faith over the last 1400 years, this is a deeply philosophical novel.

He is an award-winning author and journalist whose recent novel Cuddy (2023) won the Goldsmiths Prize. The stench of it is the perfume of bus stations everywhere; the desperate reek of transience at the crossroads of intoxicated. As a journalist he has written about the arts and nature for publications including New Statesman, The Guardian, The Spectator, NME, Mojo, Time Out, New Scientist, Caught By The River, The Morning Star, Vice, The Quietus, Melody Maker and numerous others. From that point began a series of buildings which would eventually become one of the most spectacular cathedrals in Europe. and from Cuthbert's history, dressed up in fictional packaging that was sometimes very beautiful and sometimes dismayingly forced.

But sections 3 and 4 became tiresome quickly, as we are asked again to switch styles and to abandon characters we had invested in. Cuddy is told (mainly) in four distinct parts, all written in unique styles and telling a different part of the legend and myth of St Cuthbert over more than 1,000 years in the north of England. Cuthbert’s remains have been moved several times to avoid Viking raiders and they are on the move again with a group of monks plus a few others on the lookout for a final resting place.

I admit I was a little daunted by the style when I first started but then Gallows Pole unnerved me to begin with. A man who lived alone on a rocky island in the North Sea, preferring the solitude and the wild birds to the company of men. The playscript of the interlude and the ornate pastiche of the Victorian ghost story lead us to the rich and resonant prosody of the final section, its twin emphasis on sense of place and societal disjuncture keenly familiar from Myers’s previous work in novels including The Gallows Pole and The Perfect Golden Circle.Highly recommended for historical fiction fans, those who love Myers' work or simply readers who love a great story.

And the way that certain characters (eg an owl-eyed boy) and certain motifs (eg wild garlic) echo through the ages makes the sum greater than its sometimes flawed parts. No, he is not that big, but when he enters you it opens you up so that it feels like the world has a tear in its fabric and white light is beaming through, illuminating, seeking a path.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Most of all, it's about those who have come before us and how they shape who we are, how we can be guided by the past. It is mostly at the fictional end of the historical fiction spectrum, and although St Cuthbert or Cuddy is, along with Durham Cathedral, the main link between its parts, he remains a peripheral and elusive figure who mostly appears in the other protagonists' dreams and vision. We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed.