Aberaeron author Cynan Jones will release a collection of six short stories about men under duress.

Described by the award-winning author of The Dig and Cove as “big hard-hitting stories”, Pulse is a collection of viscerally powerful short stories in which man is pitted against nature, against circumstance, and against himself.

A man heads into the snow to hunt down the bear that has been taking stock from farms in the valley. A father tries to make something go right for the son he no longer lives with. A partner is called to help when a cow's labour goes horribly wrong. A fierce storm threatens to bring down a tree on powerlines over a family's home.

Fear, vulnerability, tension and resolve course through these arresting and indelible stories from one of the finest British writers at work today.

“The collection comes nearly 20 years after my first novel The Long Dry was published, and, as with most of the other books, all the stories bar one are inspired by and set in the Ceredigion landscape,” Cynan explained.

His previous work has won him 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 appeared in more than 20 countries, on BBC Radio 4 and in Granta, Freeman's, and the New Yorker.

Cynan was the 2008 Scritture Giovani Hay Festival Fellow, has tutored extensively for Literature Wales, the Arvon Foundation, and other writing bodies.

For a number of years he was the RLF Writing Fellow at Aberystwyth University and in 2019 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

The launch of Pulse will take place in Cynan’s home town, at the final event of Aberaeron Book Festival on Sunday, 2 November at 2.30pm.