Martin Shaw explores myth something carried as we notice our world become stranger, harsher or more demanding than ordinary language can manage.

Shaw argues that contemporary life is not storyless but badly storied, saturated with thin narratives of progress, identity, productivity and self-invention while cut off from older symbolic structures that once helped people understand initiation, loss, obligation, desire and transformation. 

The book moves between mythic retelling, cultural criticism, theology and memoir. Shaw writes about initiation, ordeal, severance and return; about reading myths on their own terms rather than flattening them into allegory; and about the long personal route that eventually brought him toward Christianity, including the now fairly legendary 101-night vigil he undertook in a Dartmoor forest. The religious turn is explicit, but the book’s broader concern is with what happens when a culture loses the stories capable of making difficulty meaningful without pretending difficulty can simply be solved. 

Edition: Ebury Vine / Penguin Random House UK, 2026. First UK edition, hardback. 256pp. Published 26 May 2026.