The Dig — Cynan Jones

Life and death, animals and land, and a farmer and a stranger are all inextricably linked in this “dark, tense, and vital” award-winning novel (The Guardian). Daniel is a farmer in rural Wales who raises lambs. Another unnamed man hunts badgers and sells them to the locals. Slowly, the isolated lives of these two men spiral toward each other with a grim, inescapable logic. Written in a spare yet utterly gripping voice, Jones's fourth novel received the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize and “is brilliantly alive; a profound, powerful and utterly absorbing portrayal of a subterranean rural world” (The Guardian). As acclaimed by the Daily Telegraph, “It is a book about the essentials: life and death, cruelty and compassion. It is a book that will get in your bones, and haunt you.”