Pulse

Breathtakingly tense, vital and precise. Cynan Jones has a rare gift for making us experience, moment by moment, the struggles of his characters to survive -- Carys Davies
Pellucid clinical sentences craft a loving symphony of meat and magic, mucous, mud and mire. Cynan Jones's writing is pure electric energy... Every story thrums and squirms with life. The cumulative effect is to deliver a shock to the heart of what a wild, strange and wonderful thing it is to be human -- Megan Barker
The often layered, dark subject matter of Jones' stories is belied by the clarity of his language in a fascinating way -- Sara Baume
Each paragraph reads like a beautiful, multi-layered prose poem. The crystalline language conveys, with real emotive power, the squelch and suck of mud and manure, the stink of blood, the skin-feel of drizzle. Spending time with this collection is a sensory, immersive experience -- Niall Griffiths
A master of concision and precision, Cynan Jones crafts stories as taut as steel wire, a tightrope display of careful draughtsmanship and daring language -- Jon Gower
Pulse reveals the bloody, brutal and beautiful truth of rural life. Hewn with a sparse, poetic vision, it offers an unflinching, visceral account of the often-neglected lives of those who toil the land. There is no finer nature writer than Cynan Jones -- Adelle Stripe
These six stories of characters in states of extreme jeopardy are rendered in language of relentless and precise power and the overall effect is of an almost visionary intensity. Pulse is a remarkable collection from a writer of singular gifts -- Tom Lee
These are stories of elemental power, which dramatise the collision of external and internal forces to thrilling and unsettling effect. Their exploration of the struggle between people and nature - both that of the world, and their own - is always riveting and frequently heartbreaking. Pulse is a magnificent collection -- James Scudamore
A force of creaturely urgency. Cynan Jones is a blast of fresh air, a stumble in the dark, and a sudden chill in the guts -- Tim Winton
Jones's prose is extraordinary, somehow managing to be simultaneously rich and spare. Each of the stories is a novel in miniature, a whole emotional landscape evoked precisely with the most minimal gestures -- Jessie Greengrass
The six tales in Cynan Jones's new collection vibrate with fear... Shot through with moments of arresting originality and beauty * TLS *
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 * Daily Mail *
Cynan Jones is something of a writer's writer... Fear not - that doesn't mean insular and cliquey, or showily verbose. Closer to the opposite of those things, in fact: portraits of inscrutable, evidently flawed rural working-class people, outlined via brutalist and economic prose studded with moments of exquisite, often onomatopoeic lexical invention * Buzz Magazine *
Visceral and unrelenting... 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.. Powerful * Financial Times *
[Jones's] close-cropped prose brings us as close as possible to the action and emotion, but it also forces the reader to slow down and sink in deeper... Jones does not publish copiously - this is only his third slim book in a decade - but each time he does, he gives us enough to delight in for years to come * The Critic *
These stories have the stillness or minimalism of a modernist two-hander more than they do any phoney post-Hemingway machismo. 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 heightens the sense of unease with a style that favors sparsity and acoustic alertness... Jones seems to be aiming for pure onomatopoeia, a language that wholly reproduces the aural texture of rural life. These are stories that one reads with the ear as much as with the eye * Wall Street Journal *
Feels like a classical collection if ever there was one: thematically linked, stylistically minimalist * Shortlist *
Up there with Hemingway and McCarthy... Life-affirming... Pulse is another confident step on Jones' journey as one of the living greats of Welsh literature - and of English language literature as a whole * Folding Rock *