Under the Rock

Shortlisted for the Portico Prize 2019

The astonishing new work of non-fiction from the prize-winning author of The Gallows Pole and The Offing

Under the Rock is about badgers, balsam, history, nettles, mythology, moorlands, mosses, poetry, bats, wild swimming, slugs, recession, floods, logging, peacocks, community, apples, asbestos, quarries, geology, industrial music, owls, stone walls, farming, anxiety, relocation, the North, woodpiles, folklore, landslides, ruins, terriers, woodlands, ravens, dales, valleys, walking, animal skulls, trespassing, crows, factories, maps, rain - lots of rain - and a great big rock.

'Extraordinary, elemental ... never less than compelling: this is a wild, dark grimoire of a book' - TLS

'Exceptionally engaging ... beguiling ... this is a startling, unclassifiable book' - Stuart Kelly, The Scotsman

'Compelling ... admirable and engrossing. Myers writes of the rain with a poet's eye worthy of Hughes' - Erica Wagner, New Statesman

'A bone-tingling book' - Richard Benson, author of The Valley and The Farm

'A truly elemental read from which I emerged subtly changed... It has all the makings of a classic' - Miriam Darlington, author of Otter Country and Owl Sense

Auteur

Benjamin Myers is an author, journalist and poet. His novels include The Gallows Pole (2017), which received the Roger Deakin Award; Turning Blue (2016); Beastings (2014) which won the Portico Prize For Literature and the Northern Writers' Award, was longlisted for a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Award 2015 and chosen by Robert Macfarlane as one of his books of 2014; Pig Iron (2012), which won the inaugural Gordon Burn Prize and was runner-up in The Guardian's Not The Booker Prize; and Richard (2010), a Sunday Times book of the year. His journalism regularly appears in The Guardian, New Statesman, Mojo, Caught By The River, New Scientist and others. In 2017 he was selected as writer for the International Literature Showcase. He lives in the Upper Calder Valley, West Yorkshire.