Tag: Cynan Jones

‘Stock’ by Cynan Jones

“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

‘The Edge of the Shoal’ by Cynan Jones

“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