From the very moment I opened the cover I was a captive to the story, the rest of the world dissolved around me and it was only me, Calvert and Redbone.

The Perfect Golden Circle by Benjamin Myers | Waterstones The Perfect Golden Circle by Benjamin Myers | Waterstones

A controversial combination of biography and novel, Richard (2010) was a bestseller and chosen as a Sunday Times book of the year. You can also easily add this onto your Rind Road itinerary if you are thinking about heading around the entire country as well. Even in the most beautiful corners of agricultural England the excesses, violence vulnerability and loneliness of the human condition are never far away. Told in gorgeous prose that brings the blistering, dusty summer heat and richly memorable characters to life, The Perfect Golden Circle was a perfect escape from the rainy Dutch fall days.

As Redbone rightly tells us, there is no perfect circle but Dum spiro spero (While I breath I hope), so we continue striving, breathing, hoping, eventhough PTSD is crippling us or the world buffets as along from one gig to another. I've not read Benjamin Myers before and found his quiet, ponderous prose lovely and old-fashioned, the way novels used to be before hitting plot beats became more important than story.

Perfect Golden Circle’ by Benjamin Myers - WSJ Fiction: ‘The Perfect Golden Circle’ by Benjamin Myers - WSJ

His most recent novel, The Offing, was an international bestseller and selected for the Radio 2 Book Club. Over the course of a burning hot summer, two very different men – traumatized Falklands veteran Calvert, and affable, chaotic Redbone – set out nightly in a clapped-out camper van to undertake an extraordinary project. The two protagonists in the story are truly driven by their art, and their deep-seated need to bring their increasingly grandiose visions to life.

If you are fine with just seeing each place for 30 minutes and moving on to the next then that can be done in 6 hours. He has since gone on to become one of the UK's leading novelists, with several award-winning books including The Gallows Pole, which won the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction; The Offing, which was a Times (of London) and BBC Radio book of the year; and Pig Iron, which won the Gordon Burn Prize.

The Perfect Golden Circle: Selected for BBC 2 Between the

Over the course of a burning hot summer, two very different men — Calvert, an ex-soldier traumatized by his experience in the Falklands War, and his affable, off-the-grid friend Redbone — set out nightly in a decrepit camper van to undertake an extraordinary project,traversing the fields of rural England and creating crop circles in elaborate and mysterious patterns. Ben Myers is the master of English rural noir and with ‘Turning Blue’ he has created a whole new genre: folk crime. In lines I will memorise Calvert says “I’m glad you’re optimistic”, and Redbone replies, “I have to be. Myers' works can be classified as many things; historical fiction, nature writing, literary fiction, contemporary whilst also being challenging, raw, poetic and emotionally led. It’s classic Myers’ territory, involving male characters and their shortcomings, friendships and their interaction with the land and nature that surrounds them.

Neither militant or full-on hippies, but more concerned with what the book feels to be attempting to convey: Anyone with a radical idea can add another layer of mythos to culture. The sweat Myers has produced another great novel here to go with The Offing and Cuddy, already two of my favourites of all time. The crop circles draw Fleet Street stringers, ufologists, a demonic exorcist, a disgraced psychic and a retired physicist explaining to passersby that they are “created by an electro-magnetic-hydrodynamic plasma vortex”. Other works include The Gallows Pole, which won the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction, Beastings which was awarded the Portico Prize for Literature, and Pig Iron which won the inaugural Gordon Burn Prize.