A review by shimmer
The Long Dry by Cynan Jones

5.0

Simply, this is a magnificent novel. It's a gem of compression and poetic focus, cramming so much life — family life, human life, animal life, plant life, the life of an abandoned car in a field and a rickety van still on the road — into barely over one hundred pages. More astounding is the deep care and respect paid to each of those lives: nothing is slighted, however slight it might seem beside the "big" events of the novel, and nothing is shied away from either in the birth and death and blood of farm life. It is big-hearted and clear-eyed, and risky that way because (and I won't spoil anything) there are moments and details dropped casually into the flow of the novel that in any other book would have been the book, and it's easy to imagine a reader so unsettled by those moments that Jones might not win them back from that jolt as they want instead to follow that cast aside story. It's such a brave move, to unsettle our expectations of what "matters" most but it's all of a piece with a novel that treats all life — and all death — so equitably.