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 pre...

2,5*

wonderful. A Welsh Cormac McCarthy. Jones has a firm but poetic grip on his narrative, which follows the (mis)fortunes of a grieving farmer and a badger-baiter in an isolated part of Wales. Life and death are unsentimentally portrayed, grass, sheep, dogs, rats, humans all treated the same really; although it is impossible not to empathise with Daniel, the farmer as he struggles to keep up with his chores and thinks of his wife. Even the brutal badger baiter evinces sympathy (from me anyway) in t...

Haunting story about farming in Wales. It's not hard imagining the scenery. It's about life and death and survival.

It's a tender and brutal story, harsh. Cynan Jones writes the most intense short novels and has a naturalistic writing style, never romanticising life, but there is passion in the way he describes the landscape with it's colours, textures and scents. I slow my pace, feel spellbound, his writing resonates. I've read Cove too and am pretty sure I want to read his other books as well. "The scent of her was in the room and it almost choked him to understand how vital to him this was; how he could

This is such a strange story and with such startling contrasts. Love loss and tenderness, Pursuit abuse and savagery. Fragile births and horrible endings. A true pastoral (shepherding is a third of the story) delivered in sparse elegiac prose. So beautifully abbreviated it becomes more by its simplicity and surely harbors deeper meanings. What does it say when the instinctual savagery at our core must be abandoned in order to evolve? Will we be more or will we be less prepared for our future? I

I'm definitely in the minority here by saying that The Dig fell a little underwhelming, but also quite violent too. Told from multiple POVs, we have a farmer mourning the loss of his wife and another man who is involved in the act of badger-baiting. Towards the end of the book, both of them come together in shocking circumstances. It's a real dog eat dog kind of situation. Yet even though the story layout was clear and easy to read, I really struggled to determine what was going on with the char...

This is a powerful book by a class writer with a pitch-perfect ear for the sound of the language. Revolving around twin narratives, it is a study of loss and isolation, focusing on two characters, each a counterpoint to the other; one, a farmer, a brooding thinker, lost and cut adrift, becoming dimly aware of the world shutting off before him; the other, a rat-catcher and badger baiter, a perennial stranger, brooding still more darkly, disconnected. Each suffers apart in a way that’s entirely di...

Gosh, I do love me some Cynan. He never wastes a word. Simultaneously masculine and tender, the strong, dark imagery absolutely gutted me. It's a violent, unforgiving novel that is not for the weak of stomach. If you can push through the animal brutality, you'll be rewarded with a book about survival and territory and making your last stand.

Wow, very bleak but strangely poetic. Horrible scenes of badger baiting juxtaposed with the grief and loneliness of a welsh sheep farmer. A compelling story by a Welsh writer and I will look out for his others.

Visceral. Violent. Compelling. Those are the first three words that spring to mind when I think of Cynan Jones’ The Dig, a muscular little novel that is so powerful as to be Herculean.Set in a Welsh farming community, it could be described as a “rural novel”, but it’s not the bucolic countryside so often depicted in literature. This is nature red in tooth and claw. It feels earthy, rough, rugged — and realistic. Anyone who’s grown up on a farm or in a farming community will recognise the life an...

Poetically brutal. This is such a masculine landscape where the lines between animal and people blur, where pain and grief simply get ground into the pulp that is daily survival. One man attempts to nurture animal life while dealing with human death. The other seems to foster animal death, which seems like such a savage way of life. Rich. Visceral. At times, throat-closing. Jones weaves a fascinatingly touching story while simultaneously repelling the reader with scenes of such stark violence. D...

4.5*I have to admit that I had not heard about this author until hearing him speak in a literary podcast. The way he was phrasing his words intrigued me and I decided to give his book(s) a go. And I am so glad I did!His writing is the most intense and visual writing I have ever stumbled upon. There are two interrelated stories in this book and I really did not care for one of them (reading detailed descriptions of how badgers are killed in the Welsh countryside cannot really be my thing), but th...

Cynan Jones can do no wrong. Seriously, no-one can write like him - and nobody can write about Wales and the countryside (and the people who live there) like he can.The Dig focuses on two different men - a (view spoiler)[widowed (hide spoiler)] farmer and a badger-baiter. The farmer realises the badger-baiter is on his land, and things go from there. The novel is pretty short so that to reveal much else would get into spoiler territory. Don't misunderstand when I say that Jones writes about the

“He believed by this point that the badger deserved it.”This is a gut-punch of a read, but massively inspiring to the writer in me. Cynan Jones’ prose is stunning—filled with passages of uncomfortable but simple and meticulous truth. The story is rich and thought-provoking, and explores our relationships with our past, our surroundings, our loved-ones, and the animals we share this life with. Disturbing, but so worth it.