West - by Carys Davies (Paperback)

About the Book

An exquisite page-turner from the winner of the 2015 Frank O'Connor Award is a tightly knit, compulsively readable tale...with all the heft of a sprawling western classic (Booklist, starred review). 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 within two years, he leaves behind his daughter, Bess, to the tender mercies of his taciturn sister, Julie, 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 in town 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 taps the spirit of the great quest novels of Twain, Melville, Cervantes, but with a gentle feminist twist and a fraction of the page count (The Toronto Star). Moving, atmospheric (Real Simple), West is a spellbinding and timeless epic-in-miniature, an eerie parable of the American frontier, and an electric monument to possibility-- the sort of book that warms even as it devastates, that forces serious reflection and yet charms (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).

Book Synopsis

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 ObrehtWhen 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.

Review Quotes

"Slender, stark, and utterly mesmerizing." -The Mail on Sunday (UK) "A tightly-knit, compulsively readable tale...Davies' slender novel has all the heft of a sprawling western classic." -Booklist, starred review "From a distance, West looks like a slim fable; but a closer view reveals a peculiarly American self-delusion, opening up like a vast prairie. Davies is an audaciously talented writer to watch." -Minneapolis Star-Tribune "As in a lofty Bierstadt painting, Davies' slim novel presents a landscape of mystery and longing, of possibility and the hunt for the impossible....This is a book you could read in an afternoon. But you won't want to. Davies' prose is something you'll want to savor." -Suzie Eckl, Washington Independent Review of Books "This small book is a visionary and beautiful fable of discovery and dreaming, along with some harsh truths about the reality of American history and its dreamers' lives...And the writing is astonishing, right to the heart-stopping end." -Sydney Morning Herald "Moving, atmospheric." -Real Simple "A page-turner that can stop you in your tracks to linger over a sentence...It's a bravura performance - seasons come and go in a handful of words and there are masterful shifts of perspective and tense - but Davies's artistry is matched by her storytelling powers, and her denouement is cheer-raisingly satisfying." -Daily Mail

About the Author

Carys Davies's debut novel West was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, runner-up for the Society of Authors' McKitterick Prize, and winner of the Wales Book of the Year for Fiction. She is also the author of two collections of short stories, Some New Ambush and The Redemption of Galen Pike, which won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize. Her other awards include the Royal Society of Literature's V.S. Pritchett Prize, the Society of Authors' Olive Cook Short Story Award, a Northern Writers' Award, and a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library. Born in Wales, she lived and worked for twelve years in New York and Chicago, and now lives in Edinburgh. The Mission House is her most recent novel.