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.
