New Yorker fiction writer Cynan Jones returns with a powerful climate crisis story about love and loss that offers a glimpse of a tangible future in which water is commodified and vulnerable to sabotage. "As a tract of written language, it is close to perfect. As a repository for ideas, it is imaginative and far reaching. As a story of and for our times, it is very human, and deadly serious." ―Nina Allen, The Guardian Water is commodified. The Water Train that serves the city increasingly at risk of sabotage. As news breaks that construction of a gigantic Ice Dock will displace more people than first thought, protestors take to the streets and the lives of several individuals begin to interlock. A nurse on the brink of an affair. A boy who follows a stray dog out of the city. A woman who lies dying. And her husband, a marksman: a man forged by his past and fearful of the future, who weighs in his hands the possibility of death against the possibility of life. From one of the most celebrated writers of his generation, Stillicide is a moving story of love and loss and the will to survive, and a powerful glimpse of the tangible future.
Author
Cynan Jones was born in 1975 near Aberaeron, Wales where he now lives and works. He is the author of five short novels, The Long Dry, Everything I Found on the Beach, Bird, Blood, Snow, The Dig, and Cove. He has been longlisted and shortlisted for numerous international prizes and won a Society of Authors Betty Trask Award (2007), a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize (2014), the Wales Book of the Year Fiction Prize (2015) and the BBC National Short Story Award (2017). His work has been published in more than twenty countries, and short stories have appeared on BBC Radio 4 and in a number of anthologies and publications including Granta Magazine and The New Yorker. He also wrote the screenplay for an episode of the BAFTA-winning crime drama Hinterland, and Three Tales, a collection of stories for children. The Independent on Sunday declared "There is no doubt that Jones is one of the most talented writers in Britain” and he is frequently acknowledged as one of the most exciting voices of his generation. His most recent work, Stillicide, is a collection of twelve stories commissioned by BBC Radio 4 that aired over the summer 2019. He is also responsible for 'The Fart'.
