Book review: The Offing, by Benjamin Myers

In recent years there has been something which might not be called a phenomenon, and certainly not a trend, but perhaps just a slight whether in the weather. Over several years judging literary prizes, the “regional” novel, particularly about England, has seemed more prominent in both quantity and quality. I am thinking of works like Ross Raisin’s God’s Own Country, The Short Day Dying by Peter Hobbs, Joanna Kavenna’s Come To The Edge, Nicola Barker’s Burley Cross Postbox Theft, Max Porter’s Lanny and the eerie novels of Andrew Michael Hurley. It is a form that seems to circulate between satire and gothic, between aghast astonishment and awful familiarity, between elegy and ecstasy. Indeed, the rise of such novels seems coterminous with the rise in popularity of nature writing. They are worlds of noticing.