A relevant and nostalgic tale of an unlikely friendship and of the different ways one can connect to another person as well as to nature. Robert’s reminiscences of his youth and the past present us with seemingly quiet moments that are as moving as they are beautiful. Nature, with its flora and fauna, provides Robert with a respite from his impoverished reality. The landscapes around him fills him with a renewed sense of hope. As he observes the trees and flowers around him, and glimpses the wildlife roaming free, his mind drifts away from his worries and from the repercussions of war. During their meals Dulcie almost retrains Robert’s relationship to food. Growing up with food shortages Robert had never developed an appetite. Yet, with Dulcie he discovers that food can be sublime. From the inviting smells and appearances of a dish to its delicious taste. Perhaps because of such sentiments, the life Dulcie has lived, and introduces Robert to, is one of making the most of every moment. She has taken pleasure wherever it may be found: nature and literature, food and wine, love and travel. A tragedy haunts her yet she retains an enthusiasm for life, eschewing societal strictures. She shows Robert that he has choices beyond family expectation. We have the chance for you to win 10 copies of this fantastic novel for your reading group! Please enter by Friday 20 September.

Myers’ short story ‘The Folk Song Singer’ was awarded the Tom-Gallon Prize in 2014 by the Society Of Authors and published by Galley Beggar Press. His short stories and poetry have appeared in dozens of anthologies. The ending of the novel was found by some to be a little romantic and sentimental; and by others to be satisfying. Everyone agreed that the book was very visual, and one reader thought it was perhaps aimed at a film script. Other comments were that Romy’s poems were good to read, the descriptions of the sea were wonderful, and that the author made the reader feel that he “really relished what he was writing”. I’m not a curator, so I thought I’d imagine myself as a magazine editor. A Guest Editor at Turner Contemporary. The offing, but also the horizon, the sea and seaside towns were the editorial themes to which the artists could respond however they liked – the only parameter being a time limit of six minutes. The titles of their works alone suggest how they responded: Old Town, Fata Morgana*, Miasma, even volvic. Struggling to make sense of what she sees, Madeline uses the only frame of reference she knows - the stories of the bible. The result is a vivid and passionate confusion in which poverty, isolation, and a passionate response to the natural world are all mixed up with her understanding of the personality of God. Mir kam der Gedanke, dass das Meer uns die endliche Existenz aller festen Materie vor Augen führt und dass die einzig wahren Grenzen nicht Schützengräben und Unterstände und Kontrollpunkte sind, sondern zwischen Fels und Meer und Himmel liegen." - Benjamin Myers, "Offene See"Meine Erwartungen waren riesig, lieben doch so viele dieses Buch. Vor allem die unabhängigen Buchhandlungen, denn zu deren Lieblingsbuch wurde es 2020 gekührt. Und so wurde ich auch zuerst darauf aufmerksam. That same critic also prophesied – no less shrewdly – that “any theatrical version would be missing Ben Myers’s bucolic prose”. Stripped of the book’s rich language, stripped even of its outdoor settings by Helen Goddard’s fussy interior set of weather-worn wood, The Offing loses many of the qualities that make it compelling. Dulcie is less extraordinary, Robert’s coming of age is less extreme, and Romy is at once too present and too little fleshed out to make us care. The tension of their relationship is diminished. So too is the book’s central mystery about Dulcie’s long-lost lover, Romy. Okoh’s version is a three-hander in which Romy (Ingvild Lakou) moves from a haunting presence to a character in her own right, shortcutting the book’s slow-burning revelations.

However there were a few problems. Several anachronisms were noted by different readers: the remarks about “burning off calories”, a Saudi oil tanker before Saudi Arabia had started producing oil, and dialogue such as “any time soon” or “oh, right”. Also more than one person thought that the atmosphere was more like the 1920s than the 1940s. Like all your novels, it’s deeply engaged with place, in this case Robin Hood’s Bay. What was it about that landscape that made you want to write about it?The book is written in short pieces, almost like meditation tracts with evocative titles such as "The Gift" , "The River" , "The Bird",and "The Cost of Memory" several of which are almost stand alone shorts. Each section is headed with a book from the bible. McClean also made this story so relatable to everyday issues, without trying to fit too much in. With the issues of mental health and how religion can take over the mind, this novel incorporated so much of the real world whilst keeping it detailed as though through the limited scope of a young girl who knows nothing of the outside world. Although drinking in his newfound freedom, Robert’s outlook is still limited by the beliefs drummed into him about what someone like him can expect to achieve. He is therefore unprepared when he meets Dulcie Piper, a wealthy and eccentric older lady living in a rundown cottage above a remote bay. She recognises the potential in the boy and sets about inculcating an appreciation of literature. Amongst other pleasures, including fine cooking and wider thinking, she introduces him to poetry. The book was selected with the help of a panel of library staff from across the UK. Our readers loved The Offing – here are some of their comments:

I struggled with the book at times. Not because of all the religious connotations, I let these wash over me, but more with the language fourteen year old Madeline uses in her diary entries. This was not the language I would assume, rightly or wrongly, would come easily and naturally to a teenager on the brink of puberty. I found myself more interested in the older Madeline, and how she was responding to treatment than to the younger Madeline and her journey to being institutionalised. I was sixteen and free, and hungry. Hungry for food, as we all were – the shortage continued for many years – yet my appetite was for more than the merely edible.” I have seen other wars. Read about plenty more too. And what I’ve learned is that they’re all much the same […] most people just want a quiet life. A nice meal, a little love. A late-night stroll. A lie-in on a Sunday. As I said before, don’t despise the Germans.” I'm sure I remember reading somewhere that this was the first novel McCleen wrote, though it was published after her others; I can't find confirmation of that now, but turned up several references (e.g. here) to the fact that she wrote all three of her books in the same year, 2010. The reason I remembered this in the first place was that The Offering seems to bear traces of amateurishness I didn't detect in McCleen's elegant second novel, The Professor of Poetry. The story is narrated by Madeline, a long-term patient at Lethem Park Mental Infirmary. She's in her mid-thirties, although – deliberately? – she sounds decades older. Admitted as a teenager, Madeline has never recovered any memories of what happened the night she ran away from her parents' cottage (or so she claims). As she is treated by a disruptive new doctor, Dr Lucas, the story she has repressed for two decades is slowly revealed.

The Offing

Quietly gripping ... Written with Myers's customary grit and brio ... A welcome advance, one that sees Myers effortlessly extending his range * GUARDIAN *

Aside from this, I was disappointed that a book by a northerner about the north gives all the best lines to a stereotyped portrayal of a progressive southern toff. It seemed unnecessary, particularly when North Yorkshire has no shortage of strong characters. McCleen’s use of the present tense and the technique of focalization of Madeline’s sense of the divine, is an effective strategy for conveying the dream-like quality as she relives her memory while under hypnosis. At points, McCleen very cleverly evokes the sensation of suspension between two worlds: the transition between the moment a person both under and awakens is captured perfectly. In particular, Madeline’s narrative is also striking for the way she often uses synaesthesia: describing one sense in terms of another sense, especially heightened emotions and sensations in terms of colours, and for its surrealistic imagery: the Great War was the worst atrocity committed by humankind. What lessons were learned? Build bigger bombs and better bombs, that’s all. Hitler still happened, and there’ll be another angry little man along in due course. I sometimes think that in many ways we’re completely screwed, all the time. I suppose it’s a collective state of insanity. It must be, to keep repeating the same patterns of death and violence.” The more the book progressed the less convinced I became by her as a character and consequently not that interested in discovering what happened on the day of her birthday.A draft of cool, clear water, it feels like a cleansing book ... He's such a good and brave writer ... there's a lot of heart in this book ... I was comparing it to some Ted Hughes poetry and it's so much more hopeful than that ... there's light in this landscape ... A very original writer and has pushed the form in all kinds of ways * MONOCLE * His novel Beastings (2014) won the Portico Prize For Literature, was the recipient of the Northern Writers’ Award and longlisted for a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Award 2015. Widely acclaimed, it featured on several end of year lists, and was chosen by Robert Macfarlane in The Big Issue as one of his books of 2014. It was clear that she was a wise, worldly and original person and I was none of these,” he confesses. “Yet in our brief time together I had begun to feel as if I was becoming someone else. I was approaching being myself, rather than the person I had been living as.” I’m often wary of “poetic prose” but don’t mind it if truly well done. There were some nice moments: To those blessed with the gift of living, it seemed as if the present moment was a precious empty vessel waiting to be filled with experience.”