Pulse, published by Granta Books, November 6th
'Cynan Jones is a blast of fresh air, a stumble in the dark, and a sudden chill in the guts.’ Tim Winton
‘The six tales in Cynan Jones’s new collection vibrate with fear… Jones introduces a mood of fearful expectation on the first page and maintains it, with few moments of respite. Much of the tension arises from our not knowing what is going on… Such withholding of information is a studied technique on the author’s part... a means of creating mystery, sparking our curiosity and prompting us to ask questions… Pared-down though his writing may be… it is shot through with moments of arresting originality and beauty… The painterly effect is exquisite, the first sentence of the first story exemplifying the quiet power of Cynan Jones’s prose’ Times Literary Supplement
'If Ceredigion’s Cynan Jones is something of a writer’s writer, that needn’t mean insular and cliquey, or showily verbose. Closer to the opposite of those things, in fact: the six stories of Pulse portray inscrutable, evidently flawed rural working-class people, outlined via brutalist dialogue and economic prose studded with moments of exquisite, often onomatopoeic lexical invention.' Buzz Magazine
'Jones’s searing stories are freighted with emotional weight. …Dealing with fear and vulnerability, these stories head for the gut and the heart. Jones’s precise prose and the spaces between his sentences lend the stories a pulse that thrums through these powerful tales … But there are moments of beauty too.' Daily Mail
‘Jones is willing to trust his reader to understand mood and psychology through a few, sharp brush-strokes. He’s adept at the kind of subtle scaffolding needed to make sure we notice moments of tenderness or stress that don’t immediately announce themselves. ... There’s an unadorned quality to his writing in general… Immediately striking… There’s a winking knowingness…an understanding of the artful reduction that lets the reader trust he isn’t just flexing muscles for the feel of it… Jones is a gifted, well-measured writer, and these stories are valuable portraits of the sorts of people whom contemporary fiction too often overlooks.' Telegraph
'Jones is a Welsh writer of immense originality... One with rare magnitude, and one whose craft keeps pushing further down the remarkable path it is on... Pulse is another confident step on Jones’ journey... As a collection, the breadth of human emotion is vast, but a central message emanates around these questions of how individuals react to the world around them – how they find current, live meaning in things as timeless as nature, as unexplainable as luck.' Folding Rock (click to read the whole review)
‘Jones’s style is at once spare and dense; his characters think and act in lines stripped of excess yet they contain worlds… Slowly, a deeper story emerges like an object glimpsed at twilight, formless yet resonant with meaning… [V]isceral and unrelenting… But beyond the crystalline details of the moment that holds our horrified gaze lies the pain carried by the characters that is only hinted at… These snapshots of a bleak, relentless rural existence in which inner turmoil seems to be reflected back by the surrounding landscape and weather is a hallmark of Jones’s award-winning work… he has developed an impressionistic style in which nature provides an allegorical hook on which to hang stories that leave readers to intuit rather than be shown a deeper truth.' Financial Times
'Jones heightens the sense of unease with a style that favours sparsity and acoustic alertness... These are stories that one reads with the ear as much as with the eye.' Wall Street Journal
More on Pulse from John Self, in The Critic
One of Shortlist's 10 must-read winter fiction books
Cynan speaks with Gary Raymond on the BBC Wales Arts Show
'[Jones's] 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... Stock has stuck with me more than any other new story I read this year.' John Self on Stock in A Personal Anthology