* Benjamin Myers is an award-winning novelist with a major cult following who hit the mainstream in 2018 when he won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction for his novel The Gallows Pole.; * Ben's profile is growing rapidly, including several appearances on BBC 6 Music, with The Gallows Pole being selected for the first Slow Readers Book Club on the station.; * His work has been widely praised by nature writers including Robert MacFarlane, Amy Liptrot and Rob Cowen.; * This is a spellbinding contribution to the literature of landscape and place from a writer at the peak of his powers.

**Shortlisted for the Portico Prize 2019**; The astonishing new work of non-fiction from the prize-winning author of The Gallows Pole and The Offing.; Under the Rock is about badgers, balsam, history, nettles, mythology, moorlands, mosses, poetry, bats, wild swimming, slugs, recession, floods, logging, peacocks, community, apples, asbestos, quarries, geology, industrial music, owls, stone walls, farming, anxiety, relocation, the North, woodpiles, folklore, landslides, ruins, terriers, woodlands, ravens, dales, valleys, walking, animal skulls, trespassing, crows, factories, maps, rain – lots of rain – and a great big rock.; ______________; ‘Extraordinary, elemental … never less than compelling: this is a wild, dark grimoire of a book’ – TLS; ‘Exceptionally engaging … beguiling … this is a startling, unclassifiable book’ – Stuart Kelly, The Scotsman; ‘Compelling … admirable and engrossing. Myers writes of the rain with a poet’s eye worthy of Hughes’ – Erica Wagner, New Statesman; ‘A bone-tingling book’ – Richard Benson, author of The Valley and The Farm; ‘A truly elemental read from which I emerged subtly changed... It has all the makings of a classic’ – Miriam Darlington, author of Otter Country and Owl Sense