Everything I Found on the Beach

February 8, 2016
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.”

March 15, 2016

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

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