From the award-winning author of The Dig and Cove, a collection of viscerally powerful short stories in which man is pitted against nature, against circumstance, and against himself.

A man heads into the snow to hunt down the bear that has been taking stock from farms in the valley. A father tries to make something go right for the son he no longer lives with. A partner is called to help when a cow's labour goes horribly wrong. A fierce storm threatens to bring down a tree on powerlines over a family's home.

Fear, vulnerability, tension and resolve course through these arresting and indelible stories from one of the finest British writers at work today.

Details

ISBN13: 9781783782772
Format: Hardback
Number of Pages: 192
Edition:
Publication Date: 03 Feb 2026
Publisher: Granta Books
Publication City, Country: London, United Kingdom
Dimensions (cm): 19.8(H)x12.9(L)
Weight (gm):

Author Biography

CYNAN JONES won a Society of Authors Betty Trask Award 2007, a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize 2014, the Wales Book of the Year Fiction Prize 2015 and the BBC National Short Story Award 2017. His work has appeared in more than twenty countries, on BBC Radio 4 and in Granta, Freeman's, and the New Yorker. He is the author of The Dig, Cove and Stillicide.

Reviews

'Breathtakingly tense, vital and precise. Cynan Jones has a rare gift for making us experience, moment by moment, the struggles of his characters to survive' - Carys Davies
'Pellucid clinical sentences craft a loving symphony of meat and magic, mucous, mud and mire. Cynan Jones's writing is pure electric energy... Every story thrums and squirms with life. The accumulative affect is to deliver a shock to the heart of what a wild, strange and wonderful thing it is to be human' - Megan Barker
'Each paragraph reads like a beautiful, multi-layered prose poem. The crystalline language conveys, with real emotive power, the squelch and suck of mud and manure, the stink of blood, the skin-feel of drizzle. Spending time with this collection is a sensory, immersive experience' - Niall Griffiths