Shelf Life: Acclaimed author Benjamin Myers picks his top five reads

Shelf life

The highly acclaimed author of novels including Beastings and The Gallows Pole

Union Street by Pat Barker

‘I have a very distinct memory of being on a family holiday in a caravan in the mid 1980s, when I picked up a book that was sitting on the side, in the sun. It was Union Street, and my mother said, “She lives near us, ” referring to Pat Barker. That comment was the first time it ever became apparent that people like us, people like me – a comprehensive school boy living in the north-east of England during the time of Thatcherism and high unemployment – could not only consider being a writer, but could actually write about the place that they came from. It seems obvious now, but the realisation that writers can come from anywhere was hugely significant. Then when I finally read the novel years later while on a sunlounger in Turkey – an incongruous place for such a dark and very northern English book – I was bowled over by the brutal brilliance of Barker ’ s depiction of the various struggles of working-class women. She ’ s one of our very best. ’

England’s Dreaming by Jon Savage

‘I was too young to experience punk as it happened – I was born just a few months before Sex Pistols realised Anarchy In The UK – but the whole get-up-and-have-a-go, anti-establishment attitude of the scene ’ s leading exponents proved to be a huge inspiration to me when I hit my teenage years and began to play in a band of my own. The urtext for my understanding of punk as a cultural force was this fantastic and forensic dissection of the genre, by someone who witnessed it from the eye of the storm. Savage ’ s approach is intellectual and academic, but accessible too, and contextualises the music, fashion and politics of punk in a way that shows it was about so much more than safety pins and sniffing glue. England’ s Dreaming became my bible during my first forays to London aged fifteen, where I would sleep on the floor of a squat and, armed only with a travel card, would then spend an entire week undertaking exhausting pilgrimages to the all the significant and destinations in punk history, alighting at places in Chelsea, Notting Hill, Soho and far beyond. It was an invaluable alternative education in English history and the power of art to subvert the mainstream. ’

Giovanni’s Room

by James Baldwin

‘Some of my very favourite novels –Maurice by EM Forster, City Of Night by John Rechy, Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh – all explore the difficulties of gay relationships at a time when homosexuality was either outlawed or had to be publicly repressed; it ’ s something I touched upon in my previous novel The Offing. The idea that being gay somehow makes someone a lesser person is one of the great man-made tragedies, and I hope always to be an ally. Giovanni’ s Room is one of the most beautifully tender portraits of a relationship in 20th-century literature, in this case between David, an America living in Paris and Giovanni, an Italian bartender. A narrative that explores different forms of alienation – sexual, geographical, economic – this slight story nevertheless demonstrates exactly why Baldwin was such a powerful force for positive change. ’

Millstone Grit by Glyn Hughes

‘If you mention the name Hughes around where I lived in the Upper Calder Valley in West Yorkshire, most folk invariably think of the towering figure of 20th century poetry, Ted Hughes. But Glyn Hughes (no relation) was another fantastic writer, whose Millstone Grit (1975) is something of a lost classic. Subtitled “A Pennine Journey ” , it ’ s a book that somehow manages to simultaneously be travelogue, memoir, guidebook, historical overview, poetry, protopsychogeographical study and much more besides, yet without ever once standing still long enough to be truly categorisable as any of these. Like the best books it exists in a genre of one, and also like the best books readers don ’ t need to come to it with an understanding or interest in this particular corner of the world. Long out of print, I’ m pleased to report Millstone Grit is being reissued by the wonderful Little Toller with a new foreword by yours truly. ’

My Phantoms

by Gwendoline Riley

‘Gwendoline Riley might be the best British author working today; she ’ s almost certainly the most underrated. In my opinion, she ’ s the closest we ’ ve got to such singular writer as Anita Brookner, Jean Rhys or Muriel Spark. I’ ve been reading her work for nearly twenty years now and I think she reached a pinnacle with this, her most recent novel. My Phantoms ostensibly concerns the strained relationship between a daughter who has left the north of England to live a middle-class life in London, and her erratic and troubled mother (and, to a lesser extent, her hapless father). Rather than relying on plot, Riley is a master of the minutiae, a queen of the quiet, and each scene within this masterwork is weighted with the awkwardness that exists between family members who simply cannot relate to one another, and whose relationships are resigned purely to the superficial in order to survive. One particular line in the book is like a bomb going off. And that ’ s where Riley ’ s true power lies: her writing is spare and effective, and every single sentence counts. I read her and think: if only I were this good. I’ m not even jealous; her pure talent shines through. ’

BENJAMIN MYERS

‘I’ m almost loathe to publicly admit this for fear of sounding overly confident – something I very much am not – but the idea for my latest novel The Perfect Golden Circle arrived almost fully-formed, within about ten seconds of wandering out into field of barley a few summers ago. The plot, location, structure and two main characters just appeared, as if downloaded directly from the clouds above.

‘It was a very strange experience, and I tried to ignore it as I was halfway through researching and writing a much longer project, but I scribbled some notes and then six months later sat down and wrote a novel about two friends who make crop circles across the canvas of rural south-west England over the summer of 1989. This was in early 2020 and I had recently begun to work with the film director Shane Meadows, and I think that following some initial conversations with him I was hugely inspired to create, so the words poured out in a way that has never happened before. I’ m a strong believer in the power of the subconscious as a good place in which to ferment ideas, which then occasionally – hopefully – bubble up to the surface. Sometimes you just have to go with it.

‘My writing routine involves coffee, lots of walking the hills, moors and woods of West Yorkshire and making a concerted effort to write something every weekday. If I can come up with 500 words that ’ s great and 1,000 words even better, because there are always endless distractions. I also work as a journalist, so this is often on top of writing reviews and articles. But sometimes I just find myself staring out the window for long stretches; there are currently some lambs in the field next door, and they ’ re a wonderful distraction.

‘The best writing advice was given to me by Hanif Kureishi, who I interviewed when I was a 22-year-old music journalist at the now defunct Melody Maker. He told me that in order to write novels one has to make time – and not excuses. If you ’ re serious you must adjust your working and personal life accordingly, otherwise the days run away like wild beasts over the horizon, gone forever.

‘I now realise that the first ten years of writing my way through God-knows-how-many unpublishable novels were just a warm-up. You can ’ t run a marathon without training, so no-one should expect to be able to sit down and write that one book that they have within them at the first attempt. It ’ s not realistic. At some point I thought to myself, “I’ll probably not get halfway decent until I’ m forty, ” and that realisation proved to be liberating – the notion that I could only get better was enough to keep me going through years of rejections from agents and publishers.

‘That said, I’ m quite reluctant to offer concrete advice on how to write, because everyone is different and we all bring our own life experiences to the desk when we finally sit down and face the blank page, the lonely screen. Enjoy it more than you hate it is probably a good maxim to go by. And, of course, never give up. ’