Benjamin Myers Books In Order

Publication Order of Mace & Brindle Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Collections

Benjamin Myers
Benjamin Myers is a journalist and author that was born in Durham, UK in 1976. His books have been translated into many languages.

“Cuddy” won the 2023 Goldsmiths Prize. His novel “The Gallows Pole” received a Roger Deakin Award and won the Walter Scott Prize. The novel was also adapted by Shane Meadows for the BBC/A24.

“Beastings” won the Portico Prize for Literature, received the Northern Writers’ Award and was longlisted for Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Award in 2015. “Pig Iron” won the inaugural Gordon Burn Prize and “The Folk Song Singer” won the Tom Gallon Prize in 2014.

As a journalist, Benjamin has written about nature and the arts for publications like Melody Maker, The Guardian, New Scientist, Caught By the River, New Statesman, NME, The Morning Star, The Spectator, Melody Maker, Time Out, Mojo, Vice, as well as numerous others.

“The Offing” was serialized on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Book at Bedtime’ and was a Times Book of the Year, a Reading Agency Book of the Year, an I Book of the Year, a BBC Radio 2 Book Club pick and an Observer pick for 2019. The novel was also a Top 10 Bestseller in Germany and the UK.

“Pig Iron” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 2012. This is the story of John-John, a young man that is grappling with the legacy of brutality that his bare-knuckle boxer dad, Mac Wisdom (the King of the Gypsies) left behind. His new job working as the ice cream man should offer him freedom, however instead it pulls him into the dark recesses of a northeast town where his family name’s mud.

While he tries to trade parole officers, prejudice, and local gangs for his ‘green cathedral’ (the rural landscape where he seeks his solace) Mac’s rise and then bloody downfall threatens to engulf John-John’s present.

This novel, more than anything, is about the redemptive power of nature and the landscape of post-industrial northern England.

It’s the tale about a traveler that has not traveled; a young man that battles for his surname and his very survival.

“Beastings” is the second stand alone novel and was released in 2014. A baby and a girl. A poacher and a priest. This savage pursuit through the landscape of this changing rural England.

When this teen girl abducts a kid, this local priest and a poacher are the ones called on to retrieve them. Chased through the Cumbrian mountains of this distant past, the girl encounters the hermits, farmers, and hunters that occupy the remote hillside along the way and battles against the elements and starvation.

Just like an American Southern Gothic story set against the violent beauty of Northern England, this is a poetic and sparse novel about morality, corruption, and motherhood.

“Turning Blue” is the first novel in the “Mace & Brindle” series and was released in 2016. In the depths of winter in a remote Yorkshire hamlet, Melanie Muncy (a teen girl) has gone missing.

Cold Storage, the elite detective unit, dispatches DI Jim Brindle, its best man, to investigate. He may be taciturn, obsessive, and solitary, however no one on the force is more relentless in pursuit of justice. Roddy Mace (a local journalist) has sacrificed his high flying career as a reporter in London in order to take a role up with the local newspaper. For him this Muncy case offers up a shot at redemption.

Some darker forces are at work than either of these men have realized. On a farm high above this hamlet, a destitute loner, named Steven Rutter, is harboring secrets which will shock even the hardened Brindle. No one knows the bleak moors and their hiding places even better than he does.

While Mace and Brindle start prising the secrets of this case from the tight lipped locals, their investigation first leads to the pillars of this community and finally to this local celebrity that has hiding places of his own, as well as his own dark tastes.

“The Gallows Pole” is the third stand alone novel and was released in 2017. An England that is divided. From David Hartley’s isolated moorland home, he assembles this gang of land workers and weavers to embark on this criminal enterprise which will capsize the economy and become the largest case of fraud in British history.

These are the Cragg Vale Coiners and their business is ‘clipping’ (the forging of coins) which is a treasonous offense that is punishable by death.

Hartley is quite the charismatic leader, and he cares for the poor and uses intimidation and violence against any of his opponents. He’s also prone to self-delusion and these odd visions of mythical creatures.

William Deighton, an excise officer, vows to bring down the Coiners and one of their own is a turncoat, David’s empire starts crumbling. With the industrial age set to change the face of England forever, his empire’s fate is under serious threat.

Forensically assembled from legal documents and historical accounts, this is a true story about resistance which combines landscape, poetry, crime, and historical fiction, whose themes still resonate. Here’s a rarely told alternative history of the North.

“The Offing” is the fourth stand alone novel and was released in 2019. This one summer after World War II, Robert Appleyard sets off on foot from his Durham village. A coal miner’s 16 year old son, he makes his way across the northern countryside up until he hits the former smuggling village of Robin Hood’s Bay. It’s there that he meets Dulcie, this eccentric, worldly, older woman that lives in this ramshackle cottage which faces out to sea.

Staying with Dulcie, his life starts to open up into one of sea swimming, poetry, rich food, and sunburn. These two come from totally different worlds, but while the summer months pass, they form this unlikely friendship which will profoundly alter each of their futures.

This is a powerful novel about this unlikely friendship between an older woman and a young man, which is set in the former smuggling village of Robin Hood’s Bay in the aftermath of WWII.