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The stunning new novel from the prizewinning author of The Wake
Beast plunges you into the world of Edward Buckmaster, a man alone on an empty moor in the west of England. What he has left behind we don’t yet know. What he faces is an existential battle with himself, the elements, and something he begins to see in the margins of his vision: some creature that is tracking him, the pursuit of which will become an obsession.
This short, shocking, and exhilarating novel is a vivid exploration of isolation, courage, and the search for truth that continues the story set one thousand years earlier in Paul Kingsnorth’s bravura debut novel, The Wake. It extends that book’s promise and confirms Kingsnorth as one of our most daring and rewarding contemporary writers.
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Add a CommentPaul Kingsnorth's Beast is about a man who goes out on the moor to be alone. A storm hits and he becomes more alone than he anticipated. Though there's some fixing of broken ribs and fashioning a splint, the challenges in this story are far more internal. Time passes strangely in a mostly uninhabited world. Uninhabited except for the beast, which proves elusive.
This is the kind of novel that pulled me along, not by plot but by language. And then it kept me thinking with vaguely delirious yet important digressions.
It doesn't use made-up language like Kingsnorth's previous novel, The Wake and generally feels like a haunted house story, or maybe The Prisoner with a less well-hinged protagonist.