8degreesoflatitude

The first echo is there in the physical form of the book itself: a slender pinch of pages, little thicker than a floor tile; a thing to be handled carefully as if it might break, and to be read with a delicate dabbing, like eating some rare dessert. The next echo is in the form of the story within: a man in a tiny boat, striving shoreward. And there’s an echo in the sparsity of the style too.

And yet somehow it isn’t until a nine-word paragraph, put delicately in place on the forty-sixth page – which, hereabouts, is halfway through the book – that the realisation passes under you like the bow-wave of a bigger ship:

You went out. You went out too far fishing.

Ah, yes. Of course.

Cormac McCarthy, Bruce Chatwin, and, above all here, Ernest Hemingway: these are clearly Cynan Jones’ writers – the writers that…