Fleeing his demons and the dark undercurrents of life in Britain, Hilary Byrd takes refuge in a south Indian mission house next door to the presbytery where the Padre and his adoptive daughter, Priscilla, live. As Hilary's friendship with Priscilla grows, so too do the religious and nationalist tensions around them, and the mission house may not be the safe haven it seems. Meticulously crafted and tenderly subversive, The Mission House is a deeply human story of the wonders and terrors of connection in a modern world.
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.
Carys Davies’ short story collections Some New Ambush and The Redemption of Galen Pike (winner of the 2015 Frank O’Connor Award), now published in a single volume. In a remote Australian settlement a young wife with an untellable secret reluctantly invites her neighbour into her home. On a red island in a rose-coloured sea, russet-haired women dream of a fisherman with hair black as night. A Quaker spinster offers companionship to a condemned man in a Colorado jail. Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins visit a women’s asylum, and the course of literary history is changed forever. Spare, precise and charged with wit, these award-winning stories are set in places near, far and imaginary. Carys Davies takes us to a world where the lines between reality and fantasy, tragedy and comedy, madness and sanity begin to dissolve. Combining two collections—Some New Ambush and Frank O’Connor Award-winner The Redemption of Galen Pike—The Travellers and Other Stories is a work of exceptional talent and original vision. Carys Davies was born in Wales, grew up in the Midlands, lived and worked for eleven years in New York and Chicago, and now lives in Lancaster in the north of England. Before turning to fiction she worked for fifteen years as a journalist, mostly in New York and Chicago, writing for the Guardian, Times, Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph and Marie Claire, where she was a contributing editor. Her short stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and widely published in magazines, anthologies and online, including the Dublin Review, Granta New Writing and the Royal Society of Literature Review. Davies was the winner of the 2015 Frank O’Connor Award, the 2011 Royal Society of Literature’s V.S. Pritchett Prize and the 2010 Society of Authors’ Olive Cook Award. ‘She can create a micro-world, which has reverberations beyond its size and scope, which is metaphysical.’ Sarah Hall ‘These stories are so unexpected and compelling it’s difficult to find one single word to praise them. Carys Davies deserves every accolade she has received.’ Elizabeth Harrower
Shot through with wit and an aching poignancy, Some New Ambush is the first collection of stories from award winning writer Carys Davies - stories of love, loss, birth, death, betrayal, madness.
A complex family with a tortured secret, the Hamers live on a large homestead in Radnorshire, Wales. Idris, the unbending patriarch and tyrant of the family, is a man suspicious of any change. Etty, his indomitable wife, is a woman born into a world unequipped to deal with her. Oliver, their only son, is a junior boxing champion turned hellraising local legend. A novel concerned both with the huge changes of 20th-century rural life, and that life in its eternal details.
Investigating the brutal murder of a socially ambitious plantation owner in early nineteenth-century London, Sebastian St. Cyr discovers a link between the case and the seventeenth-century beheading of King Charles I.
A millennia-old prophecy was given when the Forbidden Ones were driven from Achar. And now, the Acharites witness its manifestation: Achar is under attack by an evil lord from the North, Gorgreal--his ice demons strike from the sky and kill hundreds of brave warriors in the blink of an eye. All Acharites believe the end is near. One young woman, Faraday, betrothed of Duke Borneheld, learns that all she has been told about her people's history is untrue. While fleeing to safety from the dangerous land, Faraday, rides with Axis, legendary leader of the Axe-Wielders--and hated half-brother of Borneheld--and a man Faraday secretly loves although it would be death to admit it. She embarks on a journey, which will change her life forever, in search of the true nature of her people. This grand and heroic story tells the tale of one woman's plight to learn the truth of her people and change their hearts and their minds forever. She fights against oppressive forces to share this reality and will not desist until everyone knows. . . . . The truth of the Star Gate At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Like a Québécois Bridget Jones’s Diary, Autopsy of a Boring Wife tells the hysterically funny and ultimately touching tale of forty-eight-year-old Diane, a woman whose husband is having an affair because, he says, she bores him. Diane takes the change to heart and undertakes an often ribald, highly entertaining journey to restore trust in herself--and others--that offers an astute commentary on women and girls, gender differences, and the curious institution of twenty-first century marriage. All the details are up for scrutiny in this brisk, yet tender story of a path to recovery. Autopsy of a Boring Wife is a wonderfully fresh novel of the pitfalls of an apparently “boring” life that could be any of ours.
An electrifying story of friendship, power and betrayal by the bestselling, Baileys-prize shortlisted author of The Bees. It's the day after tomorrow and the Arctic sea ice has melted. While global business carves up the new frontier, cruise ships race each other to ever-rarer wildlife sightings. The passengers of the Vanir have come seeking a polar bear. What they find is even more astonishing: a dead body. It is Tom Harding, lost in an accident three years ago and now revealed by the melting ice of Midgard glacier. Tom had come to Midgard to help launch the new venture of his best friend of thirty years, Sean Cawson, a man whose business relies on discretion and powerful connections - and who was the last person to see him alive. Their friendship had been forged by a shared obsession with Arctic exploration. And although Tom's need to save the world often clashed with Sean's desire to conquer it, Sean has always believed that underneath it all, they shared the same goals. But as the inquest into Tom's death begins, the choices made by both men - in love and in life - are put on the stand. And when cracks appear in the foundations of Sean's glamorous world, he is forced to question what price he has really paid for a seat at the establishment's table. Just how deep do the lies go?