Under the Rock

**Shortlisted for the Portico Prize 2019**; The astonishing new work of non-fiction from the prize-winning author of The Gallows Pole and The Offing.; Under the Rock is about badgers, balsam, history, nettles, mythology, moorlands, mosses, poetry, bats, wild swimming, slugs, recession, floods, logging, peacocks, community, apples, asbestos, quarries, geology, industrial music, owls, stone walls, farming, anxiety, relocation, the North, woodpiles, folklore, landslides, ruins, terriers, woodlands, ravens, dales, valleys, walking, animal skulls, trespassing, crows, factories, maps, rain lots of rain and a great big rock.; ______________; Extraordinary, elemental never less than compelling: this is a wild, dark grimoire of a book TLS; Exceptionally engaging beguiling this is a startling, unclassifiable book Stuart Kelly, The Scotsman; Compelling admirable and engrossing. Myers writes of the rain with a poets eye worthy of Hughes Erica Wagner, New Statesman; A bone-tingling book Richard Benson, author of The Valley and The Farm; A truly elemental read from which I emerged subtly changed... It has all the makings of a classic Miriam Darlington, author of Otter Country and Owl Sense