Paul Kingsnorth's debut novel, The Wake, won the 2014 Gordon Burn Prize, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Folio Prize and the Desmond Elliott Prize, and was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. He is also the author of two non-fiction books, One No, Many Yeses and Real England, and a poetry collection, Kidland. He co-founded the Dark Mountain Project, a global network of writers, artists and thinkers in search of new stories for a world on the brink. This is an extract from his second novel, Beast, published in July by Faber & Faber.