Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Biography, Literature & Literary studies

THE DIG

Cynan Jones

A mind-boggling text of only 66 pages - at once tough and muscular, but also delicate and poetic. THE DIG is a gem of a novel; a small book which deals with some of the big themes of life – persistence and isolation, both physical and emotional.

THE DIG is the story of Daniel – a sheep farmer who is grieving for his wife who died suddenly. The death is so fresh that it is all Daniel can do to keep to the routines, working the land and animals, especially now that it is lambing season, as they once did together. He feels her loss in every moment; tired by the rigours of his work, he finds himself shocked and grieving anew each time he encounters a space she used to occupy. In the same small community lives “the big man”, a large, brutal figure; a badger-baiter and ratter. His violent existence is a sharp contrast to Daniel’s: as much as Daniel is preoccupied with sustaining life and drawing it out of the land, the big man is focussed on death. Each is as much a part of the landscape as the other, and their paths are leading them to a moment of terrible conflict, where only one will walk away.

Cynan Jones was born in Wales in 1975. His first novel, The Long Dry, was published in 2006 and won a Betty Trask Award from the Society of Authors. It saw the author selected as the Hay Festival Scritture Giovani 2008.

Available products
Book Published 2023-10-12 by Granta
Book Published 2023-05-30 by Granta

Comments

Shortlisted for the Sunday Times Short Stories Award 2013

‘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.’

Yapi Kredi in Turkey under option in France (Joelle Losfeld) US: independent publisher Coffee House

‘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.’

Cynan Jones sets a thrilling new standard for our generation, and shows what a transporting device the short novel can be... I felt as though I became a better reader, and a better writer, while I was lost in THE DIG.

‘I love this book. Cynan Jones describes the natural and physical worlds in wonderful precise detail, and he weaves them into his characters' psyches in an ever deepening way. The author is unafraid of emotion, or sentiment, but it's always earned by being rooted in the telling physical reality of his characters’ lives. Both simple and epic, this novel is extraordinary.’

‘It took me over completely, the brutality in it and the tenderness. It is wonderful to read writing that's so hard and true about the land, the land as lived in now, and from within, not as observed from without or as some place in the past. We need that. Not one of Jones' plain strong words is wasted, and Wales comes through in the rhythm of the sentences as well as in what they describe.’

‘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.’

‘A brilliant novel – tense, tough and haunting.’

‘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.’