Beast

To read Beast is a joy. Prose and gaze are inseparable, and Kingsnorth’s gaze is so intense it forces a similar intensity from the reader … The more of Kingsnorth’s intensity you survive, the more you can manage … You feel alive.
M John Harrison,  Guardian

Kingsnorth’s style is a kind of ancient modernism, and he’s really the only writer doing anything like it. His taste for self-isolation has produced writing that is both powerful and singular – Beckett doing Beowulf.
London Review of Books

With its ruggedly handsome descriptions of nature and portentous spiritual self-reflection, Beast feels like Robert Macfarlane re-written by Cormac McCarthy . . . the spell is never broken.
Daily Telegraph

This is a powerful, claustrophobic novel, rendered with a minimum of the usual literary props, coaxing us into a single, damaged mind that disarmingly illustrates the universal condition.
Adam Thorpe, Times Literary Supplement

A potent, chilling but intoxicating fable, one that builds in unbearable intensity and beguiles with unflinching prose while charting the hopes and traumas of an unknowable man.
Herald Scotland

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Beast, my second novel, is the tale 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.

A portrait of isolation, instinct and a lonely spiritual quest, Beast makes up the second part of the thematic trilogy which began with The Wake and concluded with Alexandria.

Faber & Faber (UK), Graywolf Press (US), 2016

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