Paul Kingsnorth

The stunning new novel from the prize-winning author of The Wake. 'Come to a place like this . . . and you will understand soon enough that this world is a great animal, alive and breathing.' Beast plunges you into the world of Edward Buckmaster, a man alone on a west-country moor. What he has left behind we don't yet know; what he faces is an existential battle with himself, the elements and with 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 is a vivid exploration of isolation, courage and the search for truth. Short, shocking and exhilarating, it confirms Paul Kingsnorth as one of our most daring and rewarding contemporary writers.

The Beast

Emmett

Where the landscape and language unite, and thought and sensation are bound in the same bundle of nerves, the same unquestioning consciousness. The wildness of language is the wildness of a disorganised mind, a searching mind, and the wild-land over which this figure wanders in search of an elusive creature is both metaphor and real. Kingsnorth brings back with all clarity the force of the word - his words are mostly simple, references to stone, cloud, sky, rain, and the scream unlocked by pain, but he returns the world as it might have been without the distractions of the tv set, or other people's love and expectation. A simple, brutal, sensory world, before the Fall of language that damns language as a referent to a thing rather than being the thing itself. Fuck poststructuralism, when he says stone he means stone, it is a moment where the essence of the thing is laid before the reader's eyes. It is what it is, language becoming stream of consciousness and making capturing the rhythms of experience not just possible but poetically beautiful. Language is no longer the careful putting of one word after another, it is the pulse of life, the flow of things, not narrative but the cinema of experience, language is not a symbol needing translation, but paint. Where a solitary person meets nature, the sensory apparatus expands seemingly to infinity. The feeling one gets from this book is the same as walking through a woodland, or down a misshapen, uneven road in the country, smelling earth, seeing imperfection, roughness, the real.

The Beast

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