Cuddy

Cuddy is a living, breathing chorus about St Cuthbert and the northern city that grew around his coffin. Benjamin Myers weaves voices from AD 687 to the present—saints and stonecutters, milkmaids and masons, soldiers, scholars, and one hungry lad on a demolition crew—into a single line that runs straight through a thousand years. We begin with Cuthbert’s last morning on Inner Farne, then walk with the haliwerfolc who shoulder his incorrupt body through storms and Viking raids until a sign—two milkmaids calling a lost cow—names a hill: Dun Holm. There, stone by stone, a cathedral rises. We meet Eda Bullard in 1346 and the gentle mason who loves her; a cruel monk who won’t stop taking; a husband with a bow and a temper; and a city that both shelters and judges. We hear the cathedral itself speak during a winter of captivity in 1650, when starving Scottish boys fill its nave. In 1827 a skeptical Oxford antiquarian watches the slab lift and loses his grip on certainty. And in 2019 Michael—cold, skint, and steady—carries tea up 325 steps, looks out across the snow, and feels a voice in his head say: I am with you. This is a book about making: how a community carries a weight, how craft marks stone and time, and how love—messy, stubborn, ordinary—keeps returning to the work. It’s the North of England told through one saint’s long shadow, and it feels like being led by the hand through a city you thought you knew, and suddenly don’t, and now can’t live without.

• Listeners who love literary historical fiction that moves across centuries
• Fans of books about craft—stone, song, and the quiet labor that endures
• Anyone curious about saints, sanctuary, and the soul of Northern England
• Caregivers and grievers who want a tender, unsentimental companion
• Students of medieval history who enjoy a human, story-led approach

Benjamin Myers was born in Durham in 1976. He is the author of The Offing, The Gallows Pole, Beastings, and other acclaimed works of fiction and non-fiction. Winner of the Walter Scott Prize and the Portico Prize, he writes with a deep sense of place and history. His journalism has appeared in the Guardian, New Statesman, TLS and more. He lives in the Upper Calder Valley, West Yorkshire.