She has served as a faculty member at Rutgers University, Kellogg School of Management and Harvard Business School. She is a proponent of ' power posing', a self-improvement technique whose scientific validity has been questioned. The monks, ‘swift with their swaddling’, have rescued the saint’s body from the ‘devilish Danes’ and are about to carry it for hundreds of years, and pages, to its eventual resting place in the cathedral.The BIAS Map: Behavior from intergroup affect and stereotypes (2005)Īmy Joy Casselberry Cuddy (born July 23, 1972) is an American social psychologist, author and speaker. The saint, not long dead and ‘fizzy with joy’, converses with Ediva, an orphan girl who cooks for the Lindisfarne community. The poetry of Book I is nicely Anglo-Saxonly alliterative. I liked the furthering of the story by the interleaving of bibliographical references, from Bede to Simon Schama, which one might usually expect to find either in footnotes or as an appendix, but I suspect that’s because I’m of the ilk who might turn to acknowledgements before the first chapter. The book is a dazzling compendium of styles: poetry, prose, dramatic dialogue and even an epistle or two.

Nicola Sturgeon can’t complain about polarisationĬuddy opens with Myers’s address to ‘Dear friends and readers’ (when did that last happen?) and his notion that ‘novels are surely spell books’. The quest to find a safe resting place for the saint’s bones, and the building of the cathedral, form the novel’s narrative spine. Based on the life of St Cuthbert, it follows the saint’s progress from his death on the Isle of Farne in 687 to his much visited shrine in Durham cathedral. He responded with a new literary movement, the Brutalists – its manifesto: ‘Young, hungry and rejected by the mainstream.’īloomsbury has changed all that and now here he is with Cuddy, a whacking 400-page experimental novel. He has been working the literary coal face for almost 20 years, trying every kind of genre while knocking on publishers’ doors and finding them shut. He is something of a maverick – his work a mix of Hughesian lyricism and noir violence – and his success has been hard won.

It’s a humble orphan girl, not one of the Lindisfarne monks, who is given a vision of Durham cathedral

First published by a small indie press, it won the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction, garnered a two-book deal from Bloomsbury and this year is to be adapted by Shane Meadows as a BBC television series. Benjamin Myers had a lucky break with his 2017 novel, The Gallows Pole.

Cuddy book