Frank O'Connor Award-winner Davies offers a spellbinding and timeless epic-in-miniature, an eerie parable of the American frontier and an electric monument to possibility.

West (Thorndike Press Large Print Bill's Bookshelf)

Literature & Fiction

Davies, Carys

United States

Thorndike Press Large Print

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Sunday Times (UK) * The Guardian (UK) * The Washington Independent Review of Books * Sydney Morning Herald * The Los Angeles Public Library * The Irish Independent * Real Simple * Finalist for the Rathbones Folio Prize “Carys Davies is a deft, audacious visionary.” —Téa Obreht When widowed mule breeder Cy Bellman reads in the newspaper that colossal ancient bones have been discovered in the salty Kentucky mud, he sets out from his small Pennsylvania farm to see for himself if the rumors are true: that the giant monsters are still alive and roam the uncharted wilderness beyond the Mississippi River. Promising to write and to return in two years, he leaves behind his only daughter, Bess, to the tender mercies of his taciturn sister and heads west. With only a barnyard full of miserable animals and her dead mother’s gold ring to call her own, Bess, unprotected and approaching womanhood, fills lonely days tracing her father’s route on maps at the subscription library and waiting for his letters to arrive. Bellman, meanwhile, wanders farther and farther from home, across harsh and alien landscapes, in reckless pursuit of the unknown. From Frank O’Connor Award winner Carys Davies, West is a spellbinding and timeless epic-in-miniature, an eerie parable of the American frontier and an electric monument to possibility.

West: A Novel

Scribner

Clear: A Novel

British & Irish

"Tender, riveting, and inventive is Clear, the newest offering and masterpiece from the brilliant Carys Davies. It will take your breath away...What a thrill." --Sarah Jessica Parker One of Vogue's Best Books of the Year A "daring and necessary...sophisticated and playful" (The New York Times) novel from an award-winning writer, Clear is the story of a minister dispatched to a remote island to "clear" its last remaining inhabitant--an unforgettable tale of resilience, change, and hope. John, an impoverished Scottish minister, has accepted a job evicting the lone remaining occupant of an island north of Scotland--Ivar, who has been living alone for decades, with only the animals and the sea for company. Though his wife, Mary, has serious misgivings about the errand, he decides to go anyway, setting in motion a chain of events that neither he nor Mary could have predicted. Shortly after John reaches the island, he falls down a cliff and is found, unconscious and badly injured, by Ivar who takes him home and tends to his wounds. "Clear chronicles the surprising bond that develops between these two men...pack[ing] a great deal of power into a compact tale" (The Wall Street Journal) about connection, home, and hope--in which John begins to learn Ivar's language, and Ivar sees himself reflected through the eyes of another person for the first time in decades. Unfolding during the final stages of the infamous Scottish Clearances--a period of the 19th century which saw whole communities of the rural poor driven off the land in a relentless program of forced evictions--this singular novel explores what binds us together in the face of insurmountable difference, the way history shapes our deepest convictions, and how the human spirit can endure despite all odds. Moving and unpredictable, "a love letter to the scorching power of language" (The Guardian), Clear is "a jewel of a novel" (The Washington Post)--a profound and unforgettable read.

West

Literary

Highbridge Co

"Like Chekhov's great stories, Davies' . . . reward re-reading not by resolving the core mystery, but by revealing layers of meaning and complexity. " —Ladette Randolph, Ploughshares
From remote Australian settlements to the snows of Siberia, from Colorado to Cumbria, restless teenagers, middle-aged civil servants, and Quaker spinsters traverse expanses of solitude to reveal the secrets of the human heart.
Written with raw and rigorous prose, charged throughout by a prickly wit, the stories in The Redemption of Galen Pike remind us how little we know of the lives of others.
Carys Davies is currently a 2016-2017 Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library.

The Redemption of Galen Pike

Biblioasis

Granta Books

Clear

Faber and Faber

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