The Perfect Golden Circle

By: Benjamin Myers

Narrated by: Tim Key

Length: 5 hrs and 37 mins

Publisher's summary

Bloomsbury presents The Perfect Golden Circle by Benjamin Myers, read by Tim Key.

England, 1989. Over the course of a burning hot summer, two very different men—traumatised Falklands veteran Calvert and affable, chaotic Redbone—set out nightly in a clapped-out camper van to undertake an extraordinary project.

Under cover of darkness, the two men traverse the fields of rural England in secret, forming crop circles in elaborate and mysterious patterns. As the summer wears on, and their designs grow ever more ambitious, the two men find that their work has become a cult international sensation—and that an unlikely and beautiful friendship has taken root as the wheat ripens from green to gold.

Moving and exhilarating, tender and slyly witty, The Perfect Golden Circle is a captivating novel about the futility of war, the destruction of the English countryside, class inequality—and the power of beauty to heal trauma and fight power.

©2022 Benjamin Myers (P)2022 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Critic reviews

"The beauty of Myers’s language alone is reward enough to read this superb novel, but The Perfect Golden Circle offers so much more: an all-too-rare literary depiction of rural England, the depths of the two central characters, the class and ecological concerns; but most of all the human need for what the Welsh poet Bobi Jones called 'the boundless mystery that comforts being'. A truly remarkable novel." (Ron Rash)

"No one writes about the atmosphere, beauty and brutality of the English countryside better than Ben Myers. And it's hard to think of many people who can write with with such attentiveness, tenderness and force about the importance of human connection and the redemptive power of art. Quite simply, this is a magnificent book." (Wendy Erskine)

"A strange, magical extraordinary book. It's so atmospheric, so strange and affecting. I don't think I've ever read anything quite like it before, and I'm not sure how Myers has made it work, but he has - I was totally gripped by this." (Jenn Ashworth)