Cynan Jones writes delicate, brutal, and brilliant little books. I don't understand why he isn't more widely read, but my best American proxy is that Jones is like a Welsh Cormac McCarthy. The Dig is his most devastating book, a book about badger hunting and grief, a novel that made me audibly gasp on the subway, and which I stayed up until three in the morning to finish.
— MadeleineJones'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.