Safe Return Doubtful

Welsh Literature – Short Stories – published December 2025

I’m a huge fan of Jones’s writing and this is some of his best writing to date.

His trademark spare prose and brutalist dialogue suits these scenarios perfectly. They concern struggling working-class people of small rural Welsh communities (with the exception of Reindeer), their bleak existence interrupted by moments of sublime invention that concern the landscape, or the animals that inhabit it.

His characters, many of them men, are sooner or later made small and beleaguered when faced with the untameable forces of fauna, the climate and other whims of nature.

Peregrine 5 / 5 – Two men attempt a daring night raid on a peregrine’s nest on a cliff face.

Reindeer 5 / 5 – A hunter baits a trap for a dangerous bear in a snowy wilderness. With a twist. In light of the last couple of pages it’s necessary to go back and read it again. Phenomenal.

Cow 5 / 5 – A family farm struggles with illness during lambing at the same time a cow is calving.

Stock 5 / 5 – About a local shop in a rural farming community in Wales. Dark indeed..

White Square 4 / 5 – A father tries to improve the relationship with his young son who he not allowed contact with.

Pulse 5 / 5 – Trees threaten power lines near an isolated cabin in a storm. Jones writes particularly well about storms.

These are dark tales of nature with just the slightest suggestion that something is not as it should be.
From one of our very best modern writers.

My GoodReads score 5 / 5