“I write twelve pages to get one page, and I cut all the time,” Beryl Bainbridge once said. Cynan Jones is of similar mind: his most famous novel The Dig went from 90,000 words to 30,000 in one cut. His novels have been getting shorter and shorter, and now he has, well, cut out the middleman and just published a collection of stories. Stock is one of the best, a masterpiece of spring-wound tension that’s so pared-back it reads as simultaneously clear and abstract. It’s about a rural community on the edge of change, and the lengths people will go to to stop that change. To say more would spoil a story driven by the gaps left for the reader, but Stock has stuck with me more than any other new story I read this year. To return to Bainbridge: “Unless a writer is superb, I don’t think it’s enough just to go wuffling on.” Jones is superb, but he still doesn’t wuffle.
First published as a standalone story by Nightjar Press in 2023, and subsequently in the collection Pulse, Granta, 2025
A Personal Anthology 