Cove - Hardcover

“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

“I found Cove hypnotically compelling, as exciting as it is meditative, and adored the pared down yet powerful, rippling, sensate writing. A terrific read.” ―Colin Barrett, author of Young Skins

“A book distilled and elemental even by Jones's standards. It's searing, unflinching, exquisitely written―for me, his best work yet.” ―Tom Bullough, author of Addlands

"Jones’s latest book, Cove (2016, Granta), is a cinematic epic in under one hundred pages. ... Jones takes the Jack London-style story of man vs. nature and twists it so that we see man vs. his own nature when the natural world has gotten inside his head. It is the kind of book that you can read in an afternoon and wouldn’t consider putting down even if it were longer." ―Los Angeles Review

“This is writing that forces you to pay close attention... A powerful story about one man pitted against the elements, with echoes of Hemingway ... but original in its underlying poignancy; the storytelling is stripped to its bare essentials.” ―The (London) Times

“Jones strips the story down to its elemental core and much of it reads like a prose poem. His vivid descriptions allow us to feel the man's physical discomfort and flagging spirit . . . Cove is about the dangerous, unknowable rhythms of the sea . . . about devastation [...] love, loss, memory and the will to live . . . A haunting meditation on trauma and human fragility.” ―Financial Times

“Arresting . . . Jones is a highly accomplished writer in whose hands such elemental raw materials turn strange and fugitive . . . Though his novels often turn on sudden shocks, the real power of his prose lies in its slow accumulation of energy around dimly apprehended points of tension . . . Part of what's impressive about the book is that it holds its own. One might expect some level of its allusiveness, an acknowledgement of literature's other lost sailors. But Jones's writing has a cool independence, aloof from others' words.” ―The Guardian

“Charting a course somewhere between Life of Pi and Paul Kingsnorth's Beast, Cove is a minimal, occasionally mysterious, man-versus-the-elements fable . . . there's plenty under the surface of the terse, telegraphic prose. Cove repays attentive parsing.” ―Observer

“The writing [is] spare and economical . . . lyrical . . . short and intense.” ―Sunday Telegraph

“A narrative as stripped of detail as its protagonist is of his memories, which nonetheless proves curiously powerful.” ―Sunday (London) Times

“Jones's brutally, beautifully distilled, almost incantatory language is entirely his own . . . An extraordinary novel that tugs on the ideas of home and homecoming. [It] speaks louder than many a novel three times its length.” ―Daily Mail

“Jones's writing, although stripped back, is delicate and poetic . . . If Hemingway's prose resonates with universal truth, Jones's shimmers with suggestiveness and ambiguity.” ―Scotland on Sunday

“This undersung Welsh writer specialises in sinewy, sliver-thin novels that trash cosy notions about benevolent Mother Nature . . . Pungent with jeopardy, the atmosphere is stark and elemental, with a faint hint of allegory in the plight of the unnamed protagonist.” ―Metro

“Painful, moving, energising and intensely thrilling . . . Immensities happen in this slim book . . . wildly rewarding and utterly exhilarating.” ―Spectator

“Less than 100 pages long but carries more weight than most novels I read this year. It's both exciting and intense, written with a care for each word.” ―Irish Times

“Cynan Jones is utterly brilliant. The writing is so delicate and cruel and insightful. I don't understand why no statues have been erected in his honour yet.” ―Eimear McBride, Times Literary Supplement

“Cove is the latest and most accomplished of Jones's works. It once again proves Jones's formidable talent. The book is confusing and demanding and damning and everything and anything and nothing. Above all else, however, Cove is beautiful.” ―Huffington Post

“Jones plugs directly into the reader's nightmares with his fifth novel, an ultra-minimalist tale of an injured man adrift at sea in a wrecked fishing boat. There is not a word wasted in these short, sharp, epigraphic paragraphs that rival even Hemingway in their terseness . . . It's as taut as trapped fishing line, and possibly most effective when read in one sitting ― though it may not be healthy to let your heart stop beating for that long.” ―UK Press Association

“In a time when novels are getting more robust, replete with increasingly ostentatious, over-embellished writing, Cove comes as a breath of fresh air . . . In this slim novel Jones sketch[es] a formidable portrait of the fury of nature. In his visceral descriptions of the mighty sea, birds and fish, his stark primal style is reminiscent of that of Ted Hughes’ poetry. There is a cinematic thrill to his writing, which induces a sense of pulsating alarm in the reader . . . Cove is an extraordinary novel [and] a thrilling, immersive experience.” ―Wales Art Review

Praise for The Dig

“[I]ntense and remarkably condensed . . . This is a novel with a heft far beyond its size. . . . [The Dig is] a kind of diptych about violence, loss, and the different ways one can be trapped. It is absolutely unflinching.” ―New York Times Book Review

“There are moments in Cynan Jones’ flawless short novel that literally left me breathless.” ―Star Tribune, “Holiday books: Critics’ Choices”

“Jones weaves together the stories of two rural Welshmen laboring during lambing season to evoke grief, hope, ambition, and revulsion in a way that feels both eerily familiar and utterly new.” ―Los Angeles Public Library

“Cynan Jones’ The Dig marries a sense of place (in this case, the Welsh countryside) to its story as well as any book published this year.” ―Largehearted Boy, “Favorite Novels of 2015″

“While the action of the story is compelling, the real pleasures lie in Jones’s language and meditations on grief. In prose that calls to mind both the severity of Cormac McCarthy and the psychological lucidity of John Updike, Jones explores the intricacies of Daniel’s mourning . . . a refreshing counterpoint to back-to-the-land idealism.” ―Publishers Weekly, starred review

“[A] piercing novella . . . Like Cormac McCarthy, Jones can make the everyday sound fraught and biblical.” ―Kirkus, starred review

“Both Jones’s novel and most of Faulkner’s fiction challenge the always-fashionable idea that complex, interesting stories are about cosmopolitans wrestling with the tyranny of choice. . . The complexity in The Dig, as in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, comes from Jones allowing us to inhabit this struggle directly.” ―The Los Angeles Review

“Those sounding the knell for traditional stories may have a hard time explaining books like Cynan Jones’s The Dig, a swift, elegant novella . . . Jones’s language dazzles, he uses his stunning prose to tell a realistic story about the realities of loss and grief.” ―Huffington Post

“Jones is remarkably subtle and sketches the duality of his creations in the cleanest of strokes. And while his bloodier scenes are indeed gut-wrenching, they are stunningly composed: raw, visceral, adrenaline-infused writing that prompts us to flinch and quail but nonetheless keep turning the pages . . . haunting and beautiful and deserves to be read at one sitting ― not devoured, but savored.” ―Star Tribune

“I treasure books such as A Kestrel for a Knave, Cynan Jones’s The Dig. . . for engaging with this marginal pastoral tradition, showing the depths of its attachments to nature, and for refusing to treat those attachments in a romantic nativist way.” ―The Guardian (UK)

“The textures bend back and forth on one another, trading their friction, waiting, incubating. Even without any clear release, it is in this sense of meditation between opposite forces in the same land that we are carried, turned and turned as if in winds that have blown somewhere not far off in our world, one where the textured silences might hide as much menace as the loudest wailing.” ―Vice

“There’s nothing bucolic about this elemental, extraordinary tale of good and evil. It’s a bitter pill made easy to swallow thanks to art and its paean to life. The Dig is about cruelty, isolation and loss in a dark age.” ―Shelf Awareness

"The Dig is one of the most taut, haunting reading experience you’re likely to have this year.” ―Vol. 1 Brooklyn

"The Dig is a warren of inquiry into vulnerability and violence, isolation and loss, and the limits of the human spirit.” ―Guernica

“Jones’s perfectly pitched novel will appeal to anyone looking beyond sheer thrills.” ―Library Journal

“A poignantly stripped down exploration of life, love, and human cruelty that reminds us that we are all joined in a unified humanity.” ―Lisa Lucas, The Scofield

“A quietly overwhelming masterpiece of love, degeneration and the merciless landscape of grief” ―Eimear McBride, author of A Girl is a Half-formed Thing

“This slim volume has all the gravity of a black hole, and reading it is like standing on the event horizon–once you open it, there’s no going back. Inside, even the language feels somehow warped by the brutality and despair and longing at its center. It’s like a more beautiful Cormac McCarthy; a darker W.H. Auden. This book will collapse you into its single point of infinite heaviness, and you’ll love it.” ―Elliot Bay Book Company

“Jones’ sentences bristle with foreboding . . . Jones seems to be playing with the idea of the nature of man, of those who live closer in tune with the laws of nature than with those of humanity. Jones, like great poet-novelists, fills his book with beautiful sentences.” ―Electric Literature

“Jones doesn’t shy away from the stark realities of grief, cruelty, or isolation; his prose doesn’t tend to the pastoral, but has its own beauty even when the story takes a brutal turn.” ―BookRiot

“I marvel at Cynan Jones’ ability to pull off the remarkable feat of writing a stark novel that’s suffused with tenderness. His ability to navigate the intersections of psychology and place, makes The Dig a haunting portrait of an elemental world that many of us have never known, but that rings true in our bones.” ―Stephen Sparks of Green Apple Books

“There was a moment in this book so exquisite, so moving, that it carried the book right onto my top ten list, badger-baiting and all.” ―Brazos Bookstore, “Best of 2015″

“Jones’ prose clips along at an unnerving pace, barely giving you time to process the previous beautiful image, before knocking you dead with the next one.” ―Green Apple Books, “Our Favorite Books of 2015″

“Jones’s sense of place is acute, and his passion for the landscape―for its colours, its creatures, its textures, its scents―is absolutely magnetic” ―Sarah Waters

“There’s something of John Steinbeck, Cormac McCarthy and the Old Testament to this short, sharp, brutal and bewitching tale . . . Beauty and barbarity, tenderness and heartlessness are mixed in prose that reads like stark poetry. There’s almost too much truth in this unforgettable novel. But great beauty too” ―Monocle

“This is a bantamweight of a book, light on its feet but packing a wallop.” ―The Rumpus

“By turns chilling and haunting, The Dig is a visceral indictment of the continuities between the use and abuse of animals, and a meditation on the casual violence of ordinary men.” ―Patrick Flanery, author of Absolution

“A brilliant novel―tense, tough and haunting.” ―Joe Dunthorne, author of Submarine

“Take equal pinches of Hemingway and McCarthy, mix them with a huge spadeful of wild Welsh and wondrous originality, and you get The Dig. It’s brave and necessary and relevant in that it steers us into a contemplation of the world’s beauties by forcing us to consider their extinction. It is angry and heartbreaking and profoundly moving. Truly, it stirs the soul” ―Niall Griffiths

“Written with a beautifully blunt simplicity, The Dig is moving, evocative, and utterly compelling. Cynan Jones has dirt under his fingernails, and a keen sense of the rightly-placed word.” ―Jon McGregor

Praise for The Long Dry

“Jones’ books are fistfuls of raw earth... [The Long Dry] has a poetic, elemental feel that’s enlivening even when the mood is at its lowest ebb.” ―Star Tribune

“Even when nothing is happening in Jones’s fiction, a lot is happening, and the natural settings are bountifully alive.” ―Publishers Weekly

“The light in this dark tale . . . comes via its language. Jones writes about this mucky, perilous landscape with a simplicity and passion that evoke Seamus Heaney’s poetry.” ―Kirkus Reviews

“[The Long Dry] seethes with the...