Divine inspiration

Having warmly reviewed his two previous novels The Offing and The Perfect Golden Circle for Buzz - and thoroughly enjoyed their predecessor The Gallows Pole too - I was delighted to get my mitts on a review copy of Benjamin Myers' new book, published today.

It was impossible to do Cuddy justice in the space permitted - I only just about managed to squeeze in a synopsis and a few enthusiastic adjectives. A historical novel unlike any other, it's boldly experimental - though, crucially, without being remotely intimidating in the way such works so often are. On the contrary, Cuddy draws you in and holds you tight until the final page.

One request from reader to author: please can we have a Better Call Saul-style spin-off in which fabulously lusty medieval prostitute Scum Gertie - Chaucer's Wife of Bath cast as a Viz character - is given centre stage.

The book's publication has naturally pressed Myers into promotional duty. In an interview with his publisher Bloomsbury, he rolls with an opening question that is a very thinly disguised version of "Where do you get all your crazy ideas from?", talking about everything from setting a work of fiction in the distant past to Shane Meadows' forthcoming adaptation of The Gallows Pole and what we can expect next: "a novella set in Berlin in 1971" that "almost reads like a monologue, a rant, a poem and a nervous breakdown".

In the interview, Myers admits to musing over whether writing is "actually a form of mental illness": "Sometimes after finishing a novel my brain is like soup and my body feels like it has been run over." Elsewhere, in a piece about Napalm Death's infamous 1.316-second-long song 'You Suffer' for the Quietus, he writes at length about his personal experience of the traumas and tribulations of the creative process.

Finally, Myers' Books Of My Life article for the Guardian is well worth a read. As a former D H Lawrence scholar who also found childhood inspiration in the pages of Danny The Champion Of The World, turns to Jeeves & Wooster for comfort and considers a tatty copy of Jon Savage's England's Dreaming to be a Bible, I could relate to pretty much every pick.