Cuddy is a shortened form of Cuthbert and refers to St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, a seventh century shepherd boy who became a monk and then prior of Melrose Abbey and finally a hermit on the island of Lindisfarne.

For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. This book is a challenge no doubt, and demands perseverance from its readers, not all of whom will want to take on the trouble of that task. It is mostly at the fictional end of the historical fiction spectrum, and although St Cuthbert or Cuddy is, along with Durham Cathedral, the main link between its parts, he remains a peripheral and elusive figure who mostly appears in the other protagonists' dreams and vision. He is the author of ten books, including The Offing , which was an international bestseller and selected for the Radio 2 Book Club; The Gallows Pole , which won the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction and has been adapted as a BBC series by Shane Meadows; Beastings which was awarded the Portico Prize for Literature, and Pig Iron which won the inaugural Gordon Burn Prize.A controversial combination of biography and novel, Richard (2010) was a bestseller and chosen as a Sunday Times book of the year.

A set of stories from past to present with St Cuthbert (Cuddy) as a guiding presence in some way in each. I knew nothing about St Cuthbert before reading the novel although I was vaguely aware of the Early Christian church and Lindesfarne. The story of Saint Cuthbert, ‘the patron saint of Northern England’ is told through the experiences of a tenth century orphan, Ediva, who is travelling with a band of monks on their long journey with Cuddy’s corpse at the time of the Viking raids, the abused wife of a violent Durham stonemason in the fourteenth century, an Oxford historian straight out of an M R James story attending the opening of Cuthbert’s tomb in Durham Cathedral in 1827 (this section I found less convincing than the others and one particular glaring anachronism served to underline that the narrative voice here wasn’t quite believable) and Michael Cuthbert, a labourer working on the cathedral in 2019. I bought this on a whim after having visited Lindisfarne, Cuddy’s Cave, and Durham for the first time this year and it was so fun to explore the story of Cuthbert through the ages. Once again Ben Myers has built another time machine in words and I thoroughly enjoyed being humped around early medieval northern England alongside St Cuthbert's holy corpse via centuries of fisticuffs and up Durham Cathedrals tower to a sensitive take on issues of our own time.

I've read several of Benjamin Myres books and haven't been able to put them down, but not this one, not for me, I'm afraid. He is an award-winning author and journalist whose recent novel Cuddy (2023) won the Goldsmiths Prize.

The stories we tell one another are all that shall remain when time dies and even the strongest sculpted stones crumble to sand. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. The main sections span the years 995 to 2019, with each story relating to Durham Cathedral, which was founded in 1093 and houses Cuthbert's shrine. The Corpse in the Cathedral is a ghost story all the more satisfying for being populated by ghosts we have already met.I also visited Durham and Lindisfarne last month and always love a setting-driven story and was curious about the central St Cuthbert.