Cuddy

Cuddy circles Durham Cathedral and the shrine of Saint Cuthbert across more than a thousand years, told in four linked stories plus a prologue and interlude. It opens in 995 with the monks who carried Cuthbert's body across northern England to protect it from Viking raiders. It moves to 1346, where a woman married to a bowman is drawn to a mason laboring on the cathedral's final embellishments. A Victorian academic's diary follows, then a portrait of a modern laborer in austerity Britain. Myers braids poetry, prose, drama, and real historical record into a single tapestried life for the building itself, tracing how one holy place holds the faith, love, and labor of the people who pass through it.