Cuddy: Winner of the 2023 Goldsmiths Prize

Product Information

The final book is the story of Michael, a teenager labourer who in 2017 begins work at the cathedral among the repairs to the medieval masonry. This is Myers at his most modern and antagonistic. Take this short description of Durham’s early morning bus station, rank with the detritus of the night before:

I just adore discovering a book that is so perfect that I keep stopping to enjoy perfectly composed sentences .This is why I read so much .I read lots and lots of 4 star really good books but for me the joy is finding the 5 star ones .Cuddy is one of these books it is a perfectly crafted beautifully poetic book of loveliness . Some sections are written as poetry with typesetting enhancing the reading experience and others as play scripts with st Cuthbert a voice appearing from beyond the grave Amy Cuddy has galvanized tens of millions of viewers around the world with her TED talk about "power poses." Now she presents the enthralling science underlying these and many other fascinating body-mind effects, and teaches us how to use simple techniques to liberate ourselves from fear in high-pressure moments, perform at our best, and connect with and empower others to do the same. The reason why I bought this book was because Amy Cuddy's TED talk about "power posing" helped me through a difficult challenge. I felt like an impostor in my probability theory class. It was my first mathematical theory class, and, frankly, I had felt misplaced for much of the semester. I was one of the youngest people in the class and generally felt inadequate about my math preparation (even though I shouldn't have!). After watching her TED talk and committing myself to changing my posture and presence, I started feeling and thinking like I wasn't an impostor anymore. By the end of the semester, I actually started enjoying coming to class. The tangible results also showed as well. During the last week, we had to give a presentation about a special topic and I ended up getting an A on the final presentation! All these effects of expansive body language—increasing our feelings of power, confidence, and optimism, decreasing our feelings of stress, shoring up the positivity of our self-image, freeing us to be assertive, to take action, and to persist in the face of challenges, and preparing our bodies to be strong and grounded—also facilitate our ability to achieve presence during our biggest challenges." (262)An accessible, evidence-based, and deeply human book that shows how posture and posing can affect your mind, body, and real-world success. A warm and compassionate author urges her readers to claim their personal power so they can be fully present, access their best skills, and ultimately feel successful in every challenge they face.

Chosen as a book to watch out for in 2023 by The Times, Observer, Guardian, Irish TImes and Scotsman** This will be incredibly difficult for me to review. My admiration of Benjamin Myers' work is well known, and I think with Cuddy- because it is extremely experimental in style and approach- he has positioned himself more than ever before to be in the running for a longlist nomination on this year's Booker Prize. The styles of the novels differ and each reader will likely find a different part appeals. The first section is perhaps the most innovative, with prose poetry mixed with a story told from attributed quotes from various sources, ancient and modern, on which Ben Myers has drawn. 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.Attending to just words might undermine our ability to spot lies, by causing us to not notice non-verbals. While this was an interesting read and I may apply some of the concepts it discussed to my own life, half of the time it felt extremely repetitive and self-serving. Beautifully written in a moving prose, this book recounts the legend of St. Cuthbert, his life, his death and his legacy.

Turning Blue (2016) was described as a "folk crime" novel, and praised by writers including Val McDermid. A sequel These Darkening Days followed in 2017. So, overall, while I didn't like some parts, I always appreciated his trademark brilliant prose and, man, that first section is worth the cover price alone. In this unique new novel by Benjamin Myers, the story of Cuddy 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. While his actual life is mostly myth and legend, his posthumous wanderings are points of fact and history. St Cuthbert, or Cuddy, is the de facto patron saint of northern England, and in his eponymous novel Benjamin Myers traces not the saint’s story but his echo, his shadow, the impact that a potent idea of connectedness – however fragmentary – can have on a region and on a people. This very fragmentation of St Cuthbert’s story, indeed, reveals Myers’s true subject to be the plasticity of history itself, as the shards of a story fly through time, endlessly assembled, disassembled and reassembled, so they retain power and tremendous potential.

Church Times/RSCM:

Book II tells of masons repairing the cathedral stonework in 1346 and makes the saint an actor in condemning an abusive husband. The third book offers a pastiche of an M. R. James ghost story, set in 1827, when a sceptical professor finds his confidence in science challenged at the opening of the saint’s tomb. And, in the final part, a young labourer, Michael Cuthbert, has his own encounter with the numinous when unexpectedly given work in the cathedral while his mother lies dying at home. Author Benjamin Myers is no stranger to crafting dizzyingly experimental novels; in the past few years, he’s crafted The Perfect Golden Circle (about friends connecting through creating crop circle formations), The Gallows Pole (about the true story of Northern coin forgers), and The Offing (a gentle bucolic tale about post-World War II healing) to name but a few. The stories we tell one another are all that shall remain when time dies and even the strongest sculpted stones crumple to sand.’