Winner of the Walter Scott Prize for Historic Fiction 2018; Winner of A Roger Deakin Award; "Powerful, visceral writing, historical fiction at its best. Benjamin Myers is one to watch." - Pat Barker; "A phenomenal and highly energised novel.' Sebastian Barry; "From the half-forgotten history of northern working men on the brink of the Industrial Revolution, Myers has unearthed a powerful story which he tells with great vigour." - The Sunday Times; "This powerful novel is as darkly lovely as Emily Bronte's work" - Joanne Harris; "A brilliant, extraordinary book." - Mary Anne Hobbs, 6 Music; "A roaring furnace of a novel. In telling a big story about a small place, Benjamin Myers portrays social upheavals which have a sharp contemporary echo, as well as bringing to light a little-known and fascinating fragment of rural English history...he meets the challenge for every author of historical fiction - bringing alive the past and speaking forcefully to the readers of today" - The Walter Scott Prize Judges 2018; "Myers's obsession with place and power is urgently contemporary. Society is fragile. The walls can, and do, collapse. Today the political shocks of Brexit and Trump make this obvious in a way it hasn't been for a long time: the strand of malevolent machismo that seemed like deliberately shocking Gothic in Myers's 2014 novel Beastings feels closer to home now. It seems as though Myers, seer-like, has merely had to wait for the world outwardly to become as he long ago divined it to be...His element is violence and, in his element, he is thrilling: intelligent, dangerous and near untouchable." - New Statesman; "Not only one of my books of the year, but it also has my cover of the year: Sergeant Pepper meets The Omen by way of 1930s paperbacks. It's the best thing Myers has done; fierce gale-driven prose that speaks to and of the northern English landscape out of which the story rises." - Robert Macfarlane, Book of the Year, The Big Issue; "Benjamin Myers is a poet and his evocation of Hartley's moorland home is superb...this is a brutal tale told with an original, muscular voice." - The Times, summer reads pick 2018; "Myers's prose is loaded with beautiful old words that point to a deep understanding of how language, place and identity combine. A rich, mythic brew" - The TLS