A saint for the ages

Finely woven stories spanning a thousand years revisit the eventful afterlife of an English bishop.

- MARCUS HOBSON

CUDDY, by Benjamin Myers (Bloomsbury, $36.99)

Cuddy is Saint Cuthbert, northern English bishop and saint from deep in the Dark Ages, a man who lived alone on a rocky island in the North Sea, preferring the solitude and wild birds to the company of men.

In this unique new novel by Benjamin Myers, author of The Offing and The Perfect Golden Circle, Cuddy's story is retold and reworked to take place over multiple centuries after the saint's death in 687AD. In fact, most of Cuthbert's story takes place after his death, when he is exhumed and moved to safety. Though his actual life is mostly myth and legend, his posthumous wanderings are points of fact and history.

Myers reworks these stories to give us a masterpiece deserving of a place on next year's Booker Prize longlist. The finely woven stories even use lines from the referenced works of multiple historians, an inventive way to set historical narrative alongside the fiction.