“The water beneath him suddenly aglut, sentinel somehow, with jellyfish.”
Jones’s short novels pulse with a quiet, brooding tension, made tauter by the spare, cadenced prose, which approaches its subject matter obliquely and with great understatement. This story, extracted from one of these books – Cove, presides over a kayaker struck by lightning, battling injuries, fear and the elements, buoyed only by thoughts of his pregnant partner ashore, his late father. Crucially, Jones’s sentences are never mere fact conveyors, but also impact us on an abstract and affective level, the ellipses and shifts in tense and point-of-view mimicking the kayaker’s disorientation and desperation. Time distends and lumbers, skews and stills in this claustrophobic tale of oceanic survival.
First published in The New Yorker, October 2016, and available to subscribers to read here; also available to read at the Guardianonline here. Winner of the BBC National Short Story Prize 2017 and collected in The BBC National Short Story Award 2017, Comma Press, 2016
A Personal Anthology 