Everything I found on the beach /

Set on a Welsh coast, award-winning Jones' haunting tale follows the intersecting journeys of characters faced with tough decisions. Grzegorz is a Polish immigrant struggling to support his wife and two young children as they live in a crowded house with other displaced families. He constantly questions his worth as a father and provider, picks up side work at a slaughterhouse between shifts, and digs up cockles. Meanwhile, fisherman Hold is tormented by the death of his beloved friend, Danny, and is determined to provide for Danny's widow and young son, even as he struggles to make ends meet. One evening, Hold discovers a wayward boat full of parcels of drugs, which, considering the wealth it could provide, induces him to make a split-second decision. A desperate Grzegorz also makes a sudden choice, and their mutual actions set in motion an inevitable series of events that shroud this tale with a resonant sadness as it marches toward the climax. Jones deftly explores his characters' motives, particularly the hope they cling to despite the risks they take.--Strauss, Leah Copyright 2016 Booklist

Disenfranchised men desperate to improve their lot populate this lyrical novel by Jones. Adopting the diptychlike structure he used in his previous novel, The Dig, Jones presents two central characters with divergent backgrounds but a shared sense of desperation. Grzegorz is a Polish migrant worker trying to make a better life for his wife and two sons in their adopted Wales; Hold is a Welsh fisherman looking after the family of his deceased best friend. "He wanted very much to have... the sense that he had done something complete, and turned someone's life around," Hold thinks at one point, echoing Grzegorz's aspirations. The two men's narratives come together when Grzegorz, facing penury, takes a job transporting drugs for a band of gangsters. After the job goes disastrously wrong, Hold finds himself in possession of the drugs and hatches a plan to turn them to his advantage. In places, Jones's recriminations against modern life-slaughterhouses, chain stores, consumer culture-become repetitive. But with this thriller-like plot in place, Jones is free to exercise his considerable gifts as a stylist, and breathtaking descriptions of landscape and animal life abound. Describing a beach, Jones writes, "Here, the bluish rock was igneous and looked liquefied, twisted under geology's great pain." (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

In last year's The Dig, his first work released in America, Welsh novelist Jones deftly portrayed rural hardship. In this book, published in the UK before The Dig, he uses the same precise yet darkly luminous language to illuminate the harsh lives of Polish immigrant Grzegorz and Welsh fisherman Hold, who cross paths tragically with slick Irish drug lord Stringer. Grzegorz, who works in a slaughterhouse, came to the UK to find something better for his family but so far hasn't succeeded. Hold doesn't have the means to maintain his own boat or to take care of dead friend Danny's wife and son, for whom he feels responsible. The reader's heart sinks when Grzegorz signs on for a mysterious mission and Hold decides to act on his own when he finds contraband on the beach, for no good can come of it, but Jones is relentless in showing how desperate these characters are to do the best for loved ones. VERDICT Readers will have to pay attention in the slow but steady opening pages, as Jones cuts between the characters, scrupulously detailing their workaday lives. He builds tension in an ultimately gripping and important story that transcends its own bleakness.-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Two hard-living men in Wales take a risk on making ends meet selling drugs, with gloomy results. Jones' (The Dig, 2015, etc.) novel opens with a body on a beach, plainly a violent murder victim: "the body had most of the fingers of one hand off and there was a big wound to the face." Though the body isn't immediately identified, it has to do with one of the men Jones evokes after the prologue in sharp, simple, fablelike prose. One is Grzegorz, a Polish immigrant whose dream of a new life has led him to a soul-wrecking job in a slaughterhouse and an unhappy home life. Desperate for extra money, he signs on for a job ferrying illegal drugs, but the compass guiding him to his destination fails, casting him adrift. Meanwhile, Hold, a fisherman, hopes to finance his own boat and support the family of a late friend, and a package of drugs he finds on the beach seems to suggest a solution. But as he strives to get a payday out of returning the cache to its owner, he's out of his depth as a drug runner. Jones' somber tone and damp, overcast setting help make the novel a kind of critique of the new economy that put both men in such desperate straits. (Stringer, an Irish drug dealer, mocks the false promises of the "Celtic Tiger" across the sea in Dublin.) But the anguish Jones captures is largely interior, as Grzegorz bemoans his feeling stifled ("we can't become anything new") and Hold despairs of helping his friend's widow ("one chance then I could change it around"). But the drug dealers live on tenterhooks as well. So who's that body on the beach? Jones' point is that, among this class, it could be anyone. A striking and careful portrait of ambition crashing against reality. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.