Books by Benjamin Myers

As autumn draws in, a series of unexplained vicious attacks occur in a small northern town renowned for being a bohemian backwater.As the national media descends, local journalist Roddy Mace attempts to tell the story, but finds the very nature of truth brought into question. He turns to disgraced detective James Brindle for help.When further attacks occur the shattered community becomes the focus of an accelerating media that favours immediacy over truth. Murder and myth collide in a folk-crime story about place, identity and the tangled lives of those who never leave.

'Ben Myers is the master of English rural noir, and with Turning Blue, he has created a whole new genre: folk crime . this is by turns gripping, ghastly and unputdownable' PAUL KINGSNORTHIn the depths of winter in an isolated Yorkshire hamlet, a teenage girl, Melanie Muncy, is missing.The elite detective unit Cold Storage dispatches its best man to investigate. DI Jim Brindle may be obsessive, taciturn and solitary, but nobody on the force is more relentless in pursuing justice. Local journalist Roddy Mace has sacrificed a high-flying career as a reporter in London to take up a role with the local newspaper. For him the Muncy case offers the chance of redemption.Darker forces are at work than either man has realised. On a farm high above the hamlet, Steven Rutter, a destitute loner, harbours secrets that will shock even the hardened Brindle. Nobody knows the bleak moors and their hiding places better than him.As Brindle and Mace begin to prise the secrets of the case from the tight-lipped locals, their investigation leads first to the pillars of the community and finally to a local celebrity who has his own hiding places, and his own dark tastes.

At the centre of John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost (1667) is a radical commitment to divine and human freedom. This study situates Paradise Lost within the context of post-Reformation theological controversy, and pursues the theological portrayal of freedom as it unfolds throughout the poem. The study identifies and explores the ways in which Milton is both continuous and discontinuous with the major post-Reformation traditions in his depiction of predestination, creation, free will, sin, and conversion. Milton's deep commitment to freedom is shown to underlie his appropriation and creative transformation of a wide range of existing theological concepts.

Winner of the Portico Prize for Literature and the Northern Writers' Award'A brilliant, brutal novel' ROBERT MACFARLANEA 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.

WINNER OF THE GORDON BURN PRIZEAn unflinching portrait of contemporary Traveller culture by the award-winning author of The Gallows PoleJohn-John wants to escape his past. But the legacy of brutality left by his boxer father, King of the Gypsies, Mac Wisdom, overshadows his life. His new job as an ice cream man should offer freedom, but instead pulls him into the dark recesses of a northern town where his family name is mud. When he attempts to trade prejudice and parole officers for the solace of the rural landscape, Mac's bloody downfall threatens John-John's very survival.

The short pieces assembled in Salvation in My Pocket are miniature experiments in Christian joy. They are attempts at describing the difference God makes to ordinary experience, and to discover glimpses of God's light in everyday life. If there is any thread that holds these haphazard reflections together, it is just the conviction that beneath the surface of things there lurks an invitation, gentle and alluring; that even in sadness and misfortune there is always rising up, as if from hidden wells, the promise of peace; and that the final word spoken over this world, and over each human life, will be a word of joy.

About the Contributor(s):Benjamin Myers teaches theology at Charles Sturt University''s School of Theology in Sydney. He is author of Milton''s Theology of Freedom and Christ the Stranger: The Theology of Rowan Williams. He also writes at Faith & Theology, one of the world''s most popular theology blogs.