The Dig

"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.