Winner of the Portico Prize for Literature and the Northern Writers’ Award

‘A brilliant, brutal novel’ — Robert Macfarlane

A girl and a baby. A priest and a poacher. A savage pursuit through the landscape of a changing rural England.

When a teenage girl leaves the workhouse and abducts a child placed in her care, the local priest is called upon to retrieve them. Chased through the Cumbrian mountains of a distant past, the girl fights starvation and the elements, encountering the hermits, farmers and hunters who occupy the remote hillside communities. An American Southern Gothic tale set against the violent beauty of Northern England, Beastings is a sparse and poetic novel about morality, motherhood and corruption.

“Beastings describes a desperate chase across the wildest parts of Cumbria in prose as primal and denuded as the fells themselves. The evocation of landscape is intimate and elemental…. Myers has the potential to become a true tragedian of the fells.” The Guardian

“Benjamin Myers is quite simply an excellent and already accomplished writer. His prose is taut, confident, professionally polished but at the same time maintaining a sense of rustic and unrefined authenticity, that which is truly hewn.” – Sarah Hall