The Folk Song Singer & Los Deseparacidos - Benjamin Myers

By Benjamin Myers

Two very special stories from Benjamin Myers in one ebook. It's our first Galley Beggar Double-A side! The Folk Singer On a hot stormy night in London a music journalist interviews a reclusive female folk singer still living off the royalties off one hit single in the 1970s. Over too many drinks she begins to drop her guard and as thunder cracks over the city what started out as confrontation soon turns into something else entirely... The Folk Song Singer was awarded the Society Of Authors' Tom-Gallon Prize 2014. Los Desaparecidos At a resort in Mexico a young English couple meet Martin Ladore, a wealthy ex-pat who relates a tale of politi and intrigue from his time working in the international oil business. As their holiday progresses the couple find themselves pulled back into a dangerous past that appears to be catching up with this engaging but mysterious stranger.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Galley Beggar Press
• Release date: Aug 18, 2014
• ISBN: 9781910296271

Benjamin Myers

Benjamin Myers was born in Durham in 1976. He is the author of ten books, including The Offing, which was an international bestseller and selected for the Radio 2 Book Club; The Gallows Pole, which won the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction and has been adapted as a BBC series by Shane Meadows; Beastings which was awarded the Portico Prize for Literature, and Pig Iron which won the inaugural Gordon Burn Prize. He has also published non-fiction, poetry and crime novels and his journalism has appeared in publications including the Guardian, New Statesman, TLS, Caught by the River and many more. He lives in the Upper Calder Valley, West Yorkshire. benjaminmyerswriter.com / @BenMyers1

Book preview

The Folk Song Singer

&

Los Desaparecidos

Benjamin Myers

Praise for Benjamin Myers

‘Myers has the potential to become a true tragedian of the fells’ (Alfred Hickling, The Guardian)

‘Benjamin Myers is quite simply an excellent and already accomplished writer. His prose is taut, confident, professionally polished but at the same time maintaining a sense of rustic and unrefined authenticity, that which is truly hewn’ (Sarah Hall)

Ebook version published in 2014 by

Galley Beggar Press Ltd

37 Dover Street,

Norwich

NR2 3LG

Typeset by Galley Beggar Press Ltd

All rights reserved

© Benjamin Myers, 2014

The right of Benjamin Myers to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

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THE FOLK SONG SINGER

The sky is stretched tight across the city. It has a strange hue and there is a charge to the air. It is storm season and the clouds are moiling.

He arrives uncharacteristically early and takes a seat so that he can look down the street and watch her walk – observe her without the pretence of the interview situation. He sits for a minute before deciding that perhaps she might not like being on display like that, like meat in a butcher’s window, so he moves to a table further back, in the darker corner of the cafe.

He has crossed seven postcodes and one river to be here. West London. Unfamiliar territory.