Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    The Dig
    Unavailable
    The Dig
    Unavailable
    The Dig
    Ebook145 pages5 hours

    The Dig

    By Cynan Jones

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Life and death, animals and land, and a farmer and a stranger are all inextricably linked in this “dark, tense, and vital” award-winning novel (The Guardian).
     
    Daniel is a farmer in rural Wales who raises lambs. Another unnamed man hunts badgers and sells them to the locals. Slowly, the isolated lives of these two men spiral toward each other with a grim, inescapable logic. Written in a spare yet utterly gripping voice, Jones’s fourth novel received the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize and “is brilliantly alive; a profound, powerful and utterly absorbing portrayal of a subterranean rural world” (The Guardian).
     
    As acclaimed by the Daily Telegraph, “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.”
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateMar 16, 2015
    ISBN9781566893947
    Unavailable
    The Dig

    Read more from Cynan Jones

    Related to The Dig

    Related ebooks

    Psychological Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Books

      Oct 16, 2023

      What a thing of joy is a new Francis Spufford novel. Golden Hill, his debut, was a transporting piece of historical fiction that captured life in early New York in all its quirk and contingence, and deservedly won a bag of awards. His second, Light P

      3 min read

    • Article

      Joseph Cassara Wants His Characters to Break Your Heart

      Feb 1, 2018

      The Puerto Rican drag queen is a recognizable personification of New York in the 1980s, the neighbor (and opposite) of the white, Gordon Gekko-style master of the universe with his slicked-back hair. In The House of Impossible Beauties, debut novelis

      12 min read

    • Article

      The Reader

      May 1, 2020

      The Reader
      5 min read

    • Article

      Top 10 Books About Family Secrets | Jyoti Patel

      Jan 18, 2023

      Where there are families there are stories and where there are stories there are always secrets. It’s ripe crop for a writer. In literature, these are a staple of the coming-of-age novel. Family secrets seem to rise to the surface when a protagonist

      4 min read

    • Article

      Her Dark Materials

      May 6, 2022

      A novel-in-verse written in dense Dorset vernacular, Orlam is a curious and enchanting thing. Like a dark poetic almanac, it charts a year in which its heroine, nine-year-old Ira-Abel Rawles, leaves behind the innocence of her childhood. Orlam takes

      1 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      Jan 1, 2021

      Pre-apocalypse, things take on a certain radiance our eye the dystopian lens lingering on death: a field of corpses, say— then resting on an amber ditch where the assassin’s flicked cigar flares red. And now I’m eating wasps. Did you know that figs a

      2 min read

    • Article

      Animal Magic: Why Intelligence Isn’t Just For Humans

      Jun 11, 2022

      How do you spot an optimistic pig? This isn’t the setup for a punchline; the question is genuine, and in the answer lies much that is revealing about our attitudes to other minds – to minds, that is, that are not human. If the notion of an optimistic

      10 min read

    • Article

      The Ceremony

      Sep 6, 2022

      It was something. Out of nowhere, I didn’t give a shit about anything for like a month. Like nothing. I mean yeah, there’d been plenty of times where I didn’t give a shit about something. Oh that thing? Yeah, fuck that thing. I did it all the time. M

      5 min read

    • Article

      Anna Kavan’s Ice Age Dreams

      Nov 21, 2017

      Ice—the last novel Anna Kavan wrote before she was discovered dead with a syringe in her arm and her head resting on the case in which she kept her heroin—is a gem of speculative fiction. The post Anna Kavan’s Ice Age Dreams appeared first on The Mil

      4 min read

    • Article

      But We Are Here: Reading Edwidge Danticat in the Age of #MeToo

      May 31, 2018

      On April 16, 2018, Junot Díaz came forward in a daring New Yorker piece sharing his story as a survivor of childhood sexual assault. Fast-forward to May 4—Díaz appears once more in newspapers, this time in the New York Times, as the subject of accusa

      8 min read

    • Article

      The Vanished Birds

      Aug 12, 2020

      Starship captain Nia Imani returns home to one of the great trade Stations with an unexpected passenger who will change the course of history… Umbai’s Ark departed from the Colombian Elevator two years later, in early June. It was the third to leave

      5 min read

    Reviews for The Dig

    4/5

    33 ratings4 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Memorably haunting.
    • 3/5
      A short book. Weaving two stories or is it three? Of life and death. The death of a badger and the new life of lambs. A farmer and a badger baiter whose paths inevitably cross. Neatly enough done even if there is a righteous inevitability about the ending. Too many jarringly inapt adjectives scattered around in an attempt to find a different style of writing about nature. Once the book has settled down and the narrative takes over from the description it gets better.
    • 5/5
      A deep sadness at the heart of this novel. The writer knows about grief and loss and writes about it very well. The two men are both like badgers deep in their holes. The big man is almost like Daniel's badger and vice versa. The cruelty is shocking and sad too. Powerfully written.
    • 4/5
      A stark, uncompromising and poetic novella which documents the hard lives of two solitary men in Welsh sheep country. Daniel is a sheep farmer, coping alone with lambing after his wife has been killed in an accident. His story is interwoven with that of "the big man", who operates beyond the law as a badger baiter. Both of these stories are told in simple and unsentimental language that retains a beauty and a poetic precision. The two men's paths eventually collide in a brutal conclusion the precise nature of which is left unsaid.Jones is clearly a very promising writer, and this book promises to remain in the mind. I knew nothing of his work before picking up this book, but I am very glad I did.