Culture

Collection exploring rural Welsh life named Waterstones Book of the Month

17 Sep 2026 3 minute read

The paperback release of Pulse by Cynan Jones

Nation.Cymru Staff

A collection of short stories exploring Welsh rural life by one of the country’s most acclaimed contemporary writers has been named a Waterstones Book of the Month.

Pulse by Cynan Jones, published in November 2025, features several vignettes of life in rural Wales, including bear hints, fierce storms, and tense family relationships. Its paperback version was released last month.

Filled with tension and humanity, the collection was shortlisted for Wales Fiction Book of the Year and has now been named Waterstones’ Book of the Month for September.

In their announcement, they said: “Depicting the earthy richness of Welsh rural life through crystalline prose, the stories in Jones’s electrifying collection evoke universal yet intimate themes of fear and vulnerability.”

A Waterstones’ bookseller, Steven in Swansea, added that Jones is “a welsh writer at the absolute peak of their powers, whose sparse prose evokes far more than seems possible”.

Born near Aberaeron in 1975, Cynan Jones continues to live and work in the area. He is the author of five short novels, including The Long Dry, The Dig and Cove, as well as Stillicide, a collection of stories originally commissioned by BBC Radio 4.

His work has been published in more than 20 countries and has appeared in publications including The New Yorker, and his previous accolades include the BBC National Short Story Award. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2019.

Pulse, the story for which the collection is named, follows a family as they deal with a storm that has brought a tree down on power lines near their house. It was published in the New Yorker in April 2024.

In a subsequent interview, Jones reflected on the real-life experience that inspired the story and the increasingly extreme weather he has witnessed while living in Ceredigion.

The author explained: “Although readers will receive this story very much through the prism of fiction, this happened to me… People have always joked about the amount of rain we have in Wales, but the joke’s over…

“The ground is sodden. Seeds are rotting in the soil before they have a chance to sprout. It’s unseasonably cold, but when the sun appears it’s intense.

“This story is not about climate change. Everything is about climate change now. This story is because of climate change.”

Pulse and its accompanying stories have received praise from readers, with Jon Gower calling Jones a “master of concision and precision”, and Jessie Greengrass calling each story “a novel in miniature, a whole emotional landscape evoked precisely with the most minimal gestures”.

Reviewing Pulse for Nation.Cymru, author Niall Griffiths praised Jones’s distinctive writing style and its depiction of rural Wales.

“With this latest collection,” Griffiths wrote, “Cynan Jones further stamps his mark on the literature of these islands; his is an essential, extraordinary, vital voice.”

Pulse by Cynan Jones is published by Granta and is available to purchase now.

Waterstones Book of the Month spotlights the “most essential” reads in fiction, non-fiction, thrillers, science fiction and fantasy, young adult, and children’s books.

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