On a long, hot day, Gareth searches for a missing pregnant cow. A dog must be put down, there are ducks to go in the pond, there are children, and there is Kate, his wife, who may be an uncrossable distance from him. Jones's rural Wales is alive with the necessities of our own animal instincts and most human longing.
“To read Cove is to take a masterclass in taking out everything but the essentials. This is writing stripped back to the bone, and storytelling that gets under the skin. Powerful, terrifying, brilliantly done.”—Jon McGregor, author of Reservoir 13 Out at sea, in a sudden storm, a man is struck by lightning. When he wakes, injured and adrift on a kayak, his memory of who he is and how he came to be here is all but shattered. He will need to rely on his instincts, resilience, and imagination to get safely back to the woman he dimly senses is waiting for his return. This is an extraordinary, visceral portrait of a man locked in a struggle with the forces of nature.
Jones's sense of place is acute, and his passion for the landscape—for its colors, its creatures, its textures, its scents—is absolutely magnetic."—Sarah Waters "A dark, tense, and vital short novel. . . . Profound, powerful, and utterly absorbing."—The Guardian "It is a book about the essentials: life and death, cruelty and compassion. It is a book that will get in your bones, and haunt you."—Daily Telegraph "Cynan Jones's fourth novel, The Dig, is an extraordinarily powerful work—not in spite of its brevity but because of it. . . . In its marriage of profound lyricism and feeling for place, deep human compassion and unflinching savagery, this brief and beautiful novel is utterly unique."—Financial Times Built of the interlocking fates of a badger-baiter and a farmer struggling through lambing season, The Dig unfolds in a stark rural setting where man, animal, and land are at loggerheads. There is no bucolic pastoral here: this is pure, pared-down rural realism, crackling with compressed energy, from a writer of uncommon gifts. Cynan Jones was born near Aberaeron, Wales, in 1975. He is the author of three novels, The Long Dry (winner of a Betty Trask Award, 2007), Everything I Found on the Beach (2011), and The Dig (2014), winner of the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize. He is also the author of Bird, Blood, Snow (2012), the retelling of a medieval Welsh myth. The Dig is his first novel published in the United States.
A powerful climate crisis story about love and loss that offers a glimpse of a tangible future in which water is commodified and vulnerable to sabotage that is "close to perfect," "imaginative and far reaching," and "very human and deadly serious" (The Guardian). Water is commodified. The Water Train that serves the city increasingly at risk of sabotage. As news breaks that construction of a gigantic Ice Dock will displace more people than first thought, protestors take to the streets and the lives of several individuals begin to interlock. A nurse on the brink of an affair. A boy who follows a stray dog out of the city. A woman who lies dying. And her husband, a marksman: a man forged by his past and fearful of the future, who weighs in his hands the possibility of death against the possibility of life. From one of the most celebrated writers of his generation, Stillicide is a moving story of love and loss and the will to survive, and a powerful glimpse of the tangible future.
Praise for Cynan Jones: "[A] piercing novella. . . . Like Cormac McCarthy, Jones can make the everyday sound fraught and biblical." —Kirkus Reviews, starred review "Jones's perfectly pitched novel will appeal to anyone looking beyond sheer thrills." —Library Journal "This slim volume has all the gravity of a black hole, and reading it is like standing on the event horizon. . . . It's like a more beautiful Cormac McCarthy; a darker W.H. Auden." —Elliot Bay Book Company "There's nothing bucolic about this elemental, extraordinary tale of good and evil." —Shelf Awareness “Jones deftly explores his characters’ motives, particularly the hope they cling to despite the risks they take.” —Booklist “It’s as if the novel is the slowed-down spinning of a bullet through the grooves of a barrel, waiting to be released into the world.” —Vol. 1 Brooklyn “Darkly luminous . . . [Jones] builds tension in an ultimately gripping and important story that transcends its own bleakness.” —Library Journal When a net is set, and that's the way you choose, you'll hit it. Hold, a Welsh fisherman, Grzegorz, a Polish migrant worker, and Stringer, an Irish gangster, all want the chance to make their lives better. One kilo of cocaine and the sea tie them together in a fatal series of decisions. Cynan Jones was born near Aberaeron on the west coast of Wales in 1975. He is the author of four short novels, most recently The Dig (Coffee House Press, 2014), which won a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize in 2014 and the Wales Book of the Year Fiction Prize 2015. His work has been translated into several languages, and short stories have aired on BBC Radio and appeared in a number of anthologies and publications including Granta.Everything I Found on the Beach is the second of three United States releases of his work by Coffee House Press.
Hoping to give him a better start in life, Peredur's mother takes him from the estates. But when local kids cycle into his life he heads off after them, accompained by the notion of finding Arthur - an absent, imaginary guardian.. And that's when the trouble really starts. The original Peredur fights for recognition in Arthur's court. Cynan Jones turns this into a modern Quixotian romp.
There is in the short story, at its most characteristic, something we do not often find in the novel, Frank O’Connor wrote, ‘an intense awareness of human loneliness.’ The stories shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award with BookTrust 2017 all feature characters that are disconnected, willingly or unwillingly, from those around them: a mysterious out-of-towner is shunned by her new colleagues; a grieving husband retreats into his old compulsion for hoarding; a promising academic risks his career for a casual liaison with a younger man. And whether we follow the characters’ need to be alone – like the fisherman drifting dangerously far from shore – or trace it back to its root – like the daughter burying her violent father – what we find there is always unexpected. Jenni Fagan, Benjamin Markovits and Helen Oyeyemi, three of Granta’s recent ‘20 under 40’, are joined by critic and novelist, Will Eaves and Wales Book of the Year Fiction Prize winner, Cynan Jones on the 2017 shortlist. This year’s shortlist was selected by authors Eimear McBride, Jon McGregor and Sunjeev Sahota, as well as BBC Radio’s Di Speirs and acclaimed novelist Joanna Trollope who chaired the panel and introduces the collection.
Stillicide, titre original de ce texte de Cynan Jones, désigne une eau qui s’écoule goutte à goutte. On est ici propulsé dans un monde dystopique où un convoi protégé par un commando de militaires achemine l’eau jusqu’à la ville : l’eau est une ressource rare, tellement qu’il faut des tickets de rationnement pour en obtenir et que les icebergs, avec leur provision d’eau douce, sont commercialisés et charriés à travers le monde. Ainsi se dévoile lentement une intrication d’êtres qui, en douze chapitres, dépeint une société terriblement plausible, happée par le problème de l’eau et de sa redistribution. La diversité des personnages et la brièveté des chapitres permettent à chaque point de vue de s’exprimer, comme si le livre devenait la scène politique qui recueille la pluralité des opinions autour d’un enjeu central : l’eau. Dans ce roman remarquablement condensé, Cynan Jones propose d’intégrer l’écologie, le changement climatique et les ressources naturelles dans nos pratiques collectives.
Praise for Cynan Jones: "[A] piercing novella. . . . Like Cormac McCarthy, Jones can make the everyday sound fraught and biblical." —Kirkus Reviews, starred review "Jones's perfectly pitched novel will appeal to anyone looking beyond sheer thrills." —Library Journal "This slim volume has all the gravity of a black hole, and reading it is like standing on the event horizon. . . . It's like a more beautiful Cormac McCarthy; a darker W.H. Auden." —Elliot Bay Book Company "There's nothing bucolic about this elemental, extraordinary tale of good and evil." —Shelf Awareness “Jones deftly explores his characters’ motives, particularly the hope they cling to despite the risks they take.” —Booklist “It’s as if the novel is the slowed-down spinning of a bullet through the grooves of a barrel, waiting to be released into the world.” —Vol. 1 Brooklyn “Darkly luminous . . . [Jones] builds tension in an ultimately gripping and important story that transcends its own bleakness.” —Library Journal When a net is set, and that's the way you choose, you'll hit it. Hold, a Welsh fisherman, Grzegorz, a Polish migrant worker, and Stringer, an Irish gangster, all want the chance to make their lives better. One kilo of cocaine and the sea tie them together in a fatal series of decisions. Cynan Jones was born near Aberaeron on the west coast of Wales in 1975. He is the author of four short novels, most recently The Dig (Coffee House Press, 2014), which won a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize in 2014 and the Wales Book of the Year Fiction Prize 2015. His work has been translated into several languages, and short stories have aired on BBC Radio and appeared in a number of anthologies and publications including Granta.Everything I Found on the Beach is the second of three United States releases of his work by Coffee House Press.
A powerful climate crisis story about love and loss that offers a glimpse of a tangible future in which water is commodified and vulnerable to sabotage that is "close to perfect," "imaginative and far reaching," and "very human and deadly serious" (The Guardian). Water is commodified. The Water Train that serves the city increasingly at risk of sabotage. As news breaks that construction of a gigantic Ice Dock will displace more people than first thought, protestors take to the streets and the lives of several individuals begin to interlock. A nurse on the brink of an affair. A boy who follows a stray dog out of the city. A woman who lies dying. And her husband, a marksman: a man forged by his past and fearful of the future, who weighs in his hands the possibility of death against the possibility of life. From one of the most celebrated writers of his generation, Stillicide is a moving story of love and loss and the will to survive, and a powerful glimpse of the tangible future.
“To read Cove is to take a masterclass in taking out everything but the essentials. This is writing stripped back to the bone, and storytelling that gets under the skin. Powerful, terrifying, brilliantly done.”—Jon McGregor, author of Reservoir 13 Out at sea, in a sudden storm, a man is struck by lightning. When he wakes, injured and adrift on a kayak, his memory of who he is and how he came to be here is all but shattered. He will need to rely on his instincts, resilience, and imagination to get safely back to the woman he dimly senses is waiting for his return. This is an extraordinary, visceral portrait of a man locked in a struggle with the forces of nature.
Jones's sense of place is acute, and his passion for the landscape—for its colors, its creatures, its textures, its scents—is absolutely magnetic."—Sarah Waters "A dark, tense, and vital short novel. . . . Profound, powerful, and utterly absorbing."—The Guardian "It is a book about the essentials: life and death, cruelty and compassion. It is a book that will get in your bones, and haunt you."—Daily Telegraph "Cynan Jones's fourth novel, The Dig, is an extraordinarily powerful work—not in spite of its brevity but because of it. . . . In its marriage of profound lyricism and feeling for place, deep human compassion and unflinching savagery, this brief and beautiful novel is utterly unique."—Financial Times Built of the interlocking fates of a badger-baiter and a farmer struggling through lambing season, The Dig unfolds in a stark rural setting where man, animal, and land are at loggerheads. There is no bucolic pastoral here: this is pure, pared-down rural realism, crackling with compressed energy, from a writer of uncommon gifts. Cynan Jones was born near Aberaeron, Wales, in 1975. He is the author of three novels, The Long Dry (winner of a Betty Trask Award, 2007), Everything I Found on the Beach (2011), and The Dig (2014), winner of the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize. He is also the author of Bird, Blood, Snow (2012), the retelling of a medieval Welsh myth. The Dig is his first novel published in the United States.
Hoping to give him a better start in life, Peredur's mother takes him from the estates. But when local kids cycle into his life he heads off after them, accompained by the notion of finding Arthur - an absent, imaginary guardian.. And that's when the trouble really starts. The original Peredur fights for recognition in Arthur's court. Cynan Jones turns this into a modern Quixotian romp.
On a long, hot day, Gareth searches for a missing pregnant cow. A dog must be put down, there are ducks to go in the pond, there are children, and there is Kate, his wife, who may be an uncrossable distance from him. Jones's rural Wales is alive with the necessities of our own animal instincts and most human longing.
There is in the short story, at its most characteristic, something we do not often find in the novel, Frank O’Connor wrote, ‘an intense awareness of human loneliness.’ The stories shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award with BookTrust 2017 all feature characters that are disconnected, willingly or unwillingly, from those around them: a mysterious out-of-towner is shunned by her new colleagues; a grieving husband retreats into his old compulsion for hoarding; a promising academic risks his career for a casual liaison with a younger man. And whether we follow the characters’ need to be alone – like the fisherman drifting dangerously far from shore – or trace it back to its root – like the daughter burying her violent father – what we find there is always unexpected. Jenni Fagan, Benjamin Markovits and Helen Oyeyemi, three of Granta’s recent ‘20 under 40’, are joined by critic and novelist, Will Eaves and Wales Book of the Year Fiction Prize winner, Cynan Jones on the 2017 shortlist. This year’s shortlist was selected by authors Eimear McBride, Jon McGregor and Sunjeev Sahota, as well as BBC Radio’s Di Speirs and acclaimed novelist Joanna Trollope who chaired the panel and introduces the collection.
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