The Long Dry

by Cynan Jones

Overview

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 .

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781566894654
Publisher:	Coffee House Press
Publication date:	04/04/2017
Pages:	136
Sales rank:	375,832
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.50(h) x 0.50(d)

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 The Cove . His work has been translated into several languages, and short stories have appeared in a number of anthologies and publications including Granta .

Editorial Reviews

02/13/2017
A farmer mulls the frustrations of family and the hardships of agrarian life in this beautifully written short novel by Welsh writer Jones (Everything I Found on the Beach). Gareth, a husband and father of two, wakes up on a summer morning to discover that one of his cows—pregnant and due to give birth at any moment—has gone missing. As he scours the fields, he reflects on his wife’s depression, his teenage son’s waywardness, his adolescent daughter’s innocence, and the incursions of modernity that seem to threaten the only way of life he’s ever known. Brought to the farm as a child by his tranquility-seeking father, Gareth fears for the future of his land: Will his children look after it? Will it continue to sustain his family? His ruminations lend a tender, anxious beauty to his surroundings. A bee stirs up “tiny little curls of dust,” a dead calf is a “patch of wet tarmac on a new road,” gorse seeds pods explode “in the sun with sharp snaps.” What the story lacks in incident it makes up for in attention to the textures of life, which unite the family and the animals they tend. Even when nothing is happening in Jones’s fiction, a lot is happening, and the natural settings are bountifully alive. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

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

From the Publisher

2017-01-23
A Welsh farmer's search for a stray cow turns into a darker meditation on mortality.This, Jones' debut novel, is thematically of a piece with the two others previously published in the United States (The Dig, 2015; Everything I Found on the Beach, 2016): it's slim and direct, set in a gloomy-feeling rural Wales, and concerned with the fragility of life. Gareth, a farmer, is searching for a pregnant cow as the story begins, but he has plenty else on his mind, including a downhearted wife (past miscarriages weigh heavily on her) with a secret, a sullen teenage son, and an aged dog due to be put down that day. And that's just what's within the confines of his house: a long drought prompts commentaries about how difficult and feral the landscape is, from the ducks that overrun the town to a failed pig farm to moles and cats and insects that seem to constantly encroach Gareth's homestead. The light in this dark tale—which culminates with a death in the family—comes via its language. Jones writes about this mucky, perilous landscape with a simplicity and passion that evoke Seamus Heaney's poetry: "The earth was full and hungry"; "When much of the goodness of the mole was gone and the bigger insects went the ants came, cleaning the bones and the lining from the skin." That lyricism isn't always to the benefit of the main plot; Gareth's wife and children are relatively underdeveloped compared to the flora and fauna that the lost cow has wandered into. That makes the novel feel a little more hardhearted than perhaps Jones intends. (Is human death not more tragic than animal carcasses?) But he crafts an effective tension between the hard economics of farming and the earthbound challenges of nature. Jones has expressed these themes more effectively elsewhere, but this debut sets the table well for his later work.

Kirkus Reviews