A story-cycle from the deep taproot of the Sussex ‘Weald’, The Pin Jar is a record of vernacular folk tales as transcribed by the enigmatic composer and amateur ethnographer Francis J. Cardwell, who habitually, compulsively, taped the various stories and songs he encountered in the now lost pubs of his county. Earthy, half-haunted, dialect-rich—this is the true stuff of deep weird England. SAM REID’S beguiling debut presents us with the folk process of story-telling and song reimagined as a radical literary experiment and fictional archive of place-memory.

'That a chorus of ancestral voices told in the deepest Sussex vernacular can create such a pyrotechnic display of poetic language while divining new stories from old England is testament to Sam Reid’s literary gifts. I found The Pin Jar intriguing, unnerving and quite beautiful but also, most importantly, completely original.' — Benjamin Myers, author of The Gallows Pole

Rough Trade Books, 2025.