Everything I Found on the Beach
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Praise for Cynan Jones:
"[A] piercing novella. . . . Like Cormac McCarthy, Jones can make the everyday sound fraught and biblical." —Kirkus Reviews, starred review
"Jones's perfectly pitched novel will appeal to anyone looking beyond sheer thrills." —Library Journal
"This slim volume has all the gravity of a black hole, and reading it is like standing on the event horizon. . . . It's like a more beautiful Cormac McCarthy; a darker W.H. Auden." —Elliot Bay Book Company
"There's nothing bucolic about this elemental, extraordinary tale of good and evil." —Shelf Awareness
“Jones deftly explores his characters’ motives, particularly the hope they cling to despite the risks they take.” —Booklist
“It’s as if the novel is the slowed-down spinning of a bullet through the grooves of a barrel, waiting to be released into the world.” —Vol. 1 Brooklyn
“Darkly luminous . . . [Jones] builds tension in an ultimately gripping and important story that transcends its own bleakness.” —Library Journal
When a net is set, and that's the way you choose, you'll hit it. Hold, a Welsh fisherman, Grzegorz, a Polish migrant worker, and Stringer, an Irish gangster, all want the chance to make their lives better. One kilo of cocaine and the sea tie them together in a fatal series of decisions.
Cynan Jones was born near Aberaeron on the west coast of Wales in 1975. He is the author of four short novels, most recently The Dig (Coffee House Press, 2014), which won a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize in 2014 and the Wales Book of the Year Fiction Prize 2015. His work has been translated into several languages, and short stories have aired on BBC Radio and appeared in a number of anthologies and publications including Granta.Everything I Found on the Beach is the second of three United States releases of his work by Coffee House Press.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Disenfranchised men desperate to improve their lot populate this lyrical novel by Jones. Adopting the diptychlike structure he used in his previous novel, The Dig, Jones presents two central characters with divergent backgrounds but a shared sense of desperation. Grzegorz is a Polish migrant worker trying to make a better life for his wife and two sons in their adopted Wales; Hold is a Welsh fisherman looking after the family of his deceased best friend. "He wanted very much to have... the sense that he had done something complete, and turned someone's life around," Hold thinks at one point, echoing Grzegorz's aspirations. The two men's narratives come together when Grzegorz, facing penury, takes a job transporting drugs for a band of gangsters. After the job goes disastrously wrong, Hold finds himself in possession of the drugs and hatches a plan to turn them to his advantage. In places, Jones's recriminations against modern life slaughterhouses, chain stores, consumer culture become repetitive. But with this thriller-like plot in place, Jones is free to exercise his considerable gifts as a stylist, and breathtaking descriptions of landscape and animal life abound. Describing a beach, Jones writes, "Here, the bluish rock was igneous and looked liquefied, twisted under geology's great pain."
