The Perfect Golden Circle: Selected for BBC 2 Between the Covers Book Club 2022

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Even as the book explores a 33-year-old historical moment, its concerns — income inequality, police brutality and climate change, among them — remain remarkably current.” — The Southern California News Group This brilliant, funny, and delightful novel is about misfits finding purpose, and the redemptive power of artistic expression even in the bleakest of circumstances.”— Booklist, starred review The beauty of Myers' language alone is reward enough to read this superb novel, but The Perfect Golden Circle offers so much more: an all-too-rare literary depiction of rural England, the depths of the two central characters, the class and ecological concerns; but most of all the human need for what the Welsh poet Bobi Jones called the boundless mystery that comforts being. A truly remarkable novel -- RON RASH Slowly, through the routes of thought, dialogue and confrontation, Myers bares the souls of his circle makers. Their motivations are myriad: isolation, a love of nature, separation from the land, the spirit of place, myth-making, anti-capitalist perspectives on the authorship of art, rebellion against the British political class and, most wrenchingly of all, the overwhelming need to soothe broken hearts and shattered lives. Pig Ironis an important book because it tells a story that has shaped all contemporary Western humans, but is routinely, inexplicably overlooked – the great move from agricultural life to industrial life. The respect in which that shapes human culture and individual humans.”—Deborah Orr

The Perfect Golden Circle by Benjamin Myers review

One of the most interesting, restless writers of his generation ... Unfurling at the unhurried pace of a fern, it's an evocatively lyrical paean to the countryside - deeply felt and closely observed * DAILY MAIL * Quietly gripping … Written with Myers’s customary grit and brio … A welcome advance, one that sees Myers effortlessly extending his range.”— The Guardian Calvert and Redbone are two friends who make crop circles over the course of the summer of 1989, in the fields of Wiltshire,’ said Benjamin. ‘They kind of exist on the fringes of society and only really feel at peace when they're out in the fields at night. So the novel is set entirely over the course of ten different weekends under the covers of darkness.’ The human circle maker is a hugely divisive figure. He (that is not to forget his female counterparts) carries the phenomenon on his shoulders; his creations are to be worshipped but his artistry is to be decried by his cultish audience, his person libelled. He is the craftsman who silently works the moon-soaked fields of southern England, one who chooses to remain tight-lipped on his achievements and allow his unclaimed works to shape the faith of others. His actions invite three obvious questions: Who is he, both on the surface and inside? Why does he bother? What does he get from it? Benjamin Myers is not the first fiction writer to try and explore the possible answers, but with The Perfect Golden Circle he is easily the most successful. People just want to believe in something bigger than all this. Something beyond. It takes them away from the mundane details of their tiny lives. You can’t blame them.’No, indeed, you can’t. The Perfect Golden Circle is sublime, it reels you in and caresses you with its poetically beautiful prose. Highly recommended for fans of literary fiction and eco-literature. I thought it was divine. This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by Planet Radio scala radio entertainment books Scala Radio Book Club: The Perfect Golden Circle by Benjamin Myers

The Perfect Golden Circle: Selected for BBC 2 Between the

Mark began the interview by asking Benjamin about the lead characters. ‘Calvert and Redbone, the two mates that we follow in this book, who are they and what are they up to?’ Benjamin Myers is fast making the contested boundary between history and folklore his own. The ballad of Redbone and Calvert somehow combines the ease and warmth of T he Offing with the sinew and menace of The Gallows Pole -- JOHN MITCHINSON A book is shot through with a romantic, even mystical radicalism of the kind that William Blake would have approved of. * DAILY TELEGRAPH *

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. And what of the crop circles? For Calvert and Redbone, it is their true purpose. The circles themselves part of something more, something hopeful within a warring and dying world. Themes of British colonisation weigh heavily throughout the narrative, informed mostly by Calvert’s experiences of fighting in the Falklands war. I found this interesting within a contemporary novel, the exploration of colonialism, that is. Hand in hand with this is Calvert’s feelings against war and his disdain for the British aristocracy. Woven together, it makes for a powerful sentiment encapsulated within a poetically beautiful novel about fighting trauma and power in the most imaginative of ways.

Perfect Golden Circle, by Benjamin Myers Book review: The Perfect Golden Circle, by Benjamin Myers

Mark asked, ‘Your previous novel, The Gallows Pole, has been adapted for television by Shane Meadows. How did this come about?’ A strange, magical extraordinary book. It's so atmospheric, so strange and affecting. I don't think I've ever read anything quite like it before, and I'm not sure how Myers has made it work, but he has - I was totally gripped by this -- JENN ASHWORTH

Benjamin Myers’ stories inMale Tearscut right to the heart of the matter. This is fiction to be taken in gulps of pleasure – full of fire and light, wisdom and violence.”—Rob Doyle Benjamin Myers uses the efforts of the real-life Bower and Chorley as the jumping-off point for his latest novel…[it]has much to say about art, but it also has an allegorical feel.” — The Star Tribune