THE PERFECT GOLDEN CIRCLE

By Benjamin Myers

(Bloomsbury €16.99)

IT’S the sweltering summer of 1989, and we’re in the southern English countryside in the company of Calvert, a Falklands veteran, and Redbone, a former punk guitarist, who meet by night to cut crop circles into the Wiltshire wheat.

As their increasingly ambitious designs spark wonder and panic among a baffled public at home and abroad, the two long-time friends chew the fat about war, music, agriculture, and the state of the nation after ten years of Margaret Thatcher’s government.

This is a wholly amiable novel that nonetheless feels like a stretched-out short story. There isn’t much by way of drama, bar a run-in with a puffed-up young aristocrat, and the characters’ chit-chat rarely sounds like anything but a vessel for authorial reflection.

But what glues it all together is the crunchy phrase-making of Myers’s oratorical style, which can be hit-andmiss, yes, but in full flow is a joy.