“Intense and remarkably condensed. . . . This is a novel with a heft far beyond its size. . . . Absolutely unflinching.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“A refreshing counterpoint to back-to-the-land idealism.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“A piercing novella. . . . Like Cormac McCarthy, Jones can make the everyday sound fraught and biblical.”
—Kirkus, starred review
“Dark, tense and vital. . . . Jones’s spare prose is reminiscent of early Ian McEwan, although several similes are more adventurous. . . . The Dig is brilliantly alive; a profound, powerful and utterly absorbing portrayal of a subterranean rural world.”
—The Guardian
“Haunting and beautiful and deserves to be read at one sitting—not devoured, but savored.”
—The Star Tribune
"One of the most taut, haunting reading experiences you’re likely to have this year.”
—Vol. 1 Brooklyn
“A warren of inquiry into vulnerability and violence, isolation and loss, and the limits of the human spirit.”
—Guernica
“Jones doesn’t shy away from the stark realities of grief, cruelty, or isolation; his prose doesn’t tend to the pastoral, but has its own beauty even when the story takes a brutal turn.”
—BookRiot
“A quietly overwhelming masterpiece of love, degeneration and the merciless landscape of grief.”
—Eimear McBride
“Jones’s sense of place is acute, and his passion for the landscape—for its colours, its creatures, its textures, its scents—is absolutely magnetic.”
—Sarah Waters
“By turns chilling and haunting, The Dig is a visceral indictment of the continuities between the use and abuse of animals, and a meditation on the casual violence of ordinary men.”
—Patrick Flanery
“A brilliant novel—tense, tough and haunting.”
—Joe Dunthorne
“Take equal pinches of Hemingway and McCarthy, mix them with a huge spadeful of wild Welsh and wondrous originality, and you get The Dig. Truly, it stirs the soul.”
—Niall Griffiths
