The Perfect Golden Circle

**The BBC Radio 2 Book Club pick****Longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize 2022**'In this folksy, magnetic tale, two outsiders seek healing and enlightenment by creating crop formations in a Wiltshire field ... A memorable hymn to beauty' OBSERVER'The pleasures of this bountiful novel are like a glass of cool water on a parched summer day' THE TIMES'A spirited and anarchic novel... a roiling, rollicking crop-circle folk tale' GUARDIANEngland, 1989. Over the course of a burning hot summer, two very different men - traumatized Falklands veteran Calvert, and affable, chaotic Redbone - set out nightly in a clapped-out camper van to undertake an extraordinary project. Under cover of darkness, the two men traverse the fields of rural England in secret, forming crop circles in elaborate and mysterious patterns. As the summer wears on, and their designs grow ever more ambitious, the two men find that their work has become a cult international sensation - and that an unlikely and beautiful friendship has taken root as the wheat ripens from green to gold. Moving and exhilarating, tender and slyly witty, The Perfect Golden Circle is a captivating novel about the futility of war, the destruction of the English countryside, class inequality - and the power of beauty to heal trauma and fight power.'Brilliantly constructed and steeped in rural atmosphere' FINANCIAL TIMES, Best summer books of 2022

About the author

Benjamin Myers was born in Durham in 1976. 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. He has also published non-fiction, poetry and crime novels and his journalism has appeared in publications including the Guardian, New Statesman, TLS, Caught by the River and many more. He lives in the Upper Calder Valley, West Yorkshire.

benjaminmyerswriter.com / @BenMyers1

Summary

**Selected for BBC 2 Between the Covers 2022**
**The BBC Radio 2 Book Club pick**
**Longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize 2022**

'In this folksy, magnetic tale, two outsiders seek healing and enlightenment by creating crop formations in a Wiltshire field ... A memorable hymn to beauty' OBSERVER

'The pleasures of this bountiful novel are like a glass of cool water on a parched summer day' THE TIMES

'A spirited and anarchic novel... a roiling, rollicking crop-circle folk tale' GUARDIAN

England, 1989. Over the course of a burning hot summer, two very different men - traumatized Falklands veteran Calvert, and affable, chaotic Redbone - set out nightly in a clapped-out camper van to undertake an extraordinary project.

Under cover of darkness, the two men traverse the fields of rural England in secret, forming crop circles in elaborate and mysterious patterns. As the summer wears on, and their designs grow ever more ambitious, the two men find that their work has become a cult international sensation - and that an unlikely and beautiful friendship has taken root as the wheat ripens from green to gold.

Moving and exhilarating, tender and slyly witty, The Perfect Golden Circle is a captivating novel about the futility of war, the destruction of the English countryside, class inequality - and the power of beauty to heal trauma and fight power.

'Brilliantly constructed and steeped in rural atmosphere' FINANCIAL TIMES, Best summer books of 2022

Foreword

From the Walter Scott Prize-winning author of The Offing and The Gallows Pole comes a powerful new novel about male friendship and the healing power of nature; 'one of the most interesting, restless writers of his generation' (Daily Mail)

Additional text

The ever-versatile Myers channels the gently uplifting dynamics of The Offing for this richly atmospheric account of male friendship, the fragility of the countryside and the archaic allure of crop circles

Report

A book is shot through with a romantic, even mystical radicalism of the kind that William Blake would have approved of. DAILY TELEGRAPH

Product details

• Authors: Benjamin Myers
• Publisher: Bloomsbury
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 31.05.2022
• EAN: 9781526631404
• ISBN: 978-1-5266-3140-4
• No. of pages: 256
• Dimensions: 135 mm x 215 mm x 20 mm
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature > Contemporary literature (from 1945); FICTION / General, Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945), Historical fantasy