The Long Dry - Softcover

"Even when nothing is happening in Jones's fiction, a lot is happening, and the natural settings are bountifully alive." --Publishers Weekly "[The Long Dry] seethes with the brutal squelch of farming, breeding, bleeding, death, and soars with moments of shuddering human frailty and grace." --Boston Globe "The Long Dry... proves that Jones has long been consistent (and consistently good) in his stylistic and thematic wheelhouse. This novel... leaves little question as to why Jones has been called 'one of the most distinctive new voices in British fiction.'" --Rain Taxi "Jones' books are fistfuls of raw earth... [The Long Dry] has a poetic, elemental feel that's enlivening even when the mood is at its lowest ebb." --Star Tribune "Jones's lines propel us, enthrall us, and break our hearts." --Vol. 1 Brooklyn "Not since I first encountered Faulkner has a writer so impressed me with his rural wisdom. Set in the Welsh countryside, The Long Dry is at once profound and plainspoken, feral and fierce, tender and true. This book is a revelation, and Cynan Jones is a prophet of the wonderfully strange." --Peter Geye "The light in this dark tale . . . comes via its language. Jones writes about this mucky, perilous landscape with a simplicity and passion that evoke Seamus Heaney's poetry." --Kirkus Reviews "This is a beautiful little novel that leaves the reader reeling with the powerful emotions it manages to render in such a short space and with such sparse language." --Cleaver "Have you ever wanted to live in the country? Warning: this book is not about life in the country. It's about life. And death. It will make you cry, both because of the things that happen in it and because of the astoundingly unassuming language in which it is written. Read this book." --Annie Bishai, Harvard Book Store

Praise for Cynan Jones: "[A] piercing novella . . . Like Cormac McCarthy, Jones can make the everyday sound fraught and biblical."--Kirkus, starred review "Jones' prose clips along at an unnerving pace, barely giving you time to process the previous beautiful image, before knocking you dead with the next one."--Green Apple Books, Our Favorite Books of 2015 "This book will collapse you into its single point of infinite heaviness, and you'll love it."--Elliott Bay Book Company On a long, hot day, Gareth searches for a missing pregnant cow. A dog must be put down, there are ducks to go in the pond, there are children, and there is Kate, his wife, who may be an uncrossable distance from him. Jones's rural Wales is alive with the necessities of our own animal instincts and most human longing. 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 The Cove. His work has been translated into several languages, and short stories have appeared in a number of anthologies and publications including Granta.