The Dig - by Cynan Jones (Paperback)

About the Book

Cormac McCarthy meets Marilynne Robinson in this slo-mo collision between a badger-baiter and grieving farmer in rural Wales.

Book Synopsis

Cormac McCarthy meets Marilynne Robinson in this slow-motion collision between a badger-baiter and grieving farmer in rural Wales.

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.

Review Quotes

Praise for The Dig

"Intense and remarkably condensed. . . . This is a novel with a heft far beyond its size. . . . Absolutely unflinching." --The New York Times Book Review

"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

"Dark, tense and vital. . . . Jones's spare prose is reminiscent of early Ian McEwan, although several similes are more adventurous. . . . The Dig is brilliantly alive; a profound, powerful and utterly absorbing portrayal of a subterranean rural world." --The Guardian

"Haunting and beautiful and deserves to be read at one sitting--not devoured, but savored." --The Star Tribune

"One of the most taut, haunting reading experiences you're likely to have this year." --Vol. 1 Brooklyn

"A warren of inquiry into vulnerability and violence, isolation and loss, and the limits of the human spirit." --Guernica

"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

"A quietly overwhelming masterpiece of love, degeneration and the merciless landscape of grief." --Eimear McBride

"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

"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

"A brilliant novel--tense, tough and haunting." --Joe Dunthorne

"Take equal pinches of Hemingway and McCarthy, mix them with a huge spadeful of wild Welsh and wondrous originality, and you get The Dig. Truly, it stirs the soul." --Niall Griffiths

About the Author

Cynan Jones was born near Aberaeron on the west coast of Wales in 1975. He is the author of five short novels, The Long Dry; Everything I Found on the Beach; Bird, Blood, Snow; The Dig; and Cove. His work has been translated into several languages, and his short stories have appeared in a number of anthologies and publications, including Granta.