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
“Davies' slim, complex, and achingly beautiful first novel is a sculpture of daring shifts and provocative symmetries welded together by lyrical, fast-paced prose...The result is a choral performance, reminiscent of those by Penelope Fitzgerald...Deployed on the stage of the midlapsarian American frontier, Davies' chorus manages to weave threads of myth and hope into the gnarly chords of historical tragedy. A masterful first novel—the sort of book that warms even as it devastates, that forces serious reflection and yet charms.” —Kirkus, starred review
“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
“An engrossing work of historical fiction grappling with themes of vulnerability, longing and hope that transcend all contexts...West leaves the reader feeling as vulnerable and full of wonder as the book’s main characters.” —BookPage
“An exquisite debut that’s short in length but steeped in the tall tales of American myth.” —Lit Hub
“West proves what in-the-know lovers of her short stories have already been trumpeting: Carys Davies is a deft, audacious visionary, a master of the form. In West, she breaks open our fascination with fated journeys and the irrepressible draw of the unknown, imbuing the American landscape with her own rare magic, twisting the heart as few others can, brilliantly navigating the tension between narrative minimalism and imaginative opulence.” —Téa Obreht, author of The Tiger’s Wife
“To read Carys Davies' West is to encounter a myth, or a potent dream—a narrative at once new and timeless. Exquisite, continent, utterly vivid, this short novel will live on in your imagination long after you read the last page.” —Claire Messud, author of The Burning Girl and The Woman Upstairs
“West has all the stark power and immediacy of a folk-tale or a legend. It is also structured with great artistry, a beguiling sense of form and pace, and a depth in the way the characters are created, making clear that Carys Davies is a writer of immense talent.” —Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn and House of Names
"A story of determination, betrayal, folly, and reckless hope written in the grand tradition of the pioneers. You enter the familiar American frontier and shortly are convinced, with Davies’ hero, that the mammoths of the Pleistocene still shyly roam the Plains. The seams between imagination and history in this extraordinary story are invisible. I believed every word.” —Salvatore Scibona, author of The End
"Menace and mordant wit are the blood that runs through these veins, but there's a pulse of wonder in Carys Davies' West. She sees the world and its inhabitants both as we hope they are and as we fear that they might be. An audacious and enigmatic debut of thrilling dimensions, and a reminder of fiction's possibilities.”— Akhil Sharma, author of Family Life and A Life of Adventure and Delight
“West is a journey and a wonder. A man leaves what he loves and goes west in search of the amazing. A story concerned with value and language, love and absence, life and death. A debut of real distinction.” —Bernard MacLaverty, author of Midwinter Break and Cal
“One of the most haunting and beautifully crafted novels I have read in a long time... Davies has produced something quite wonderful in West. This is a gently seductive book, one that entrances right to its cleverly conceived end.” —The Sunday Times (UK)
“A multi-faceted gem of a book, 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.” —Toronto Star
“Short, incredible, violent, uplifting and empowering – how Davies manages to create such an enduring story in 150 pages is a mystery, but she nails it.” —Stylist
02/19/2018
In her transfixing first novel, Davies (author of the story collection The Redemption of Galen Pike) tells a stark story about exploration and extinction on the American continent. Driven by wanderlust to leave his small British village, Cy Bellman sets up a mule farm in rural Pennsylvania in the early 19th century. Reports of the discovery of large fossils in the Kentucky mud, “bones... that were bleached and pale and vast, like a wrecked fleet or the parched ribs of a church roof,” kindles his imagination more than his farm’s jennies and jacks: “it seemed possible that, through the giant animals, a door into the mystery of the world would somehow be opened.” Davies conveys the simultaneous ridiculousness and nobility of Bellman’s obsession, which compels this Don Quixote in a stovepipe hat to leave his daughter to determine whether mammoth beasts still wander the nation’s vast western expanse. Bellman’s Sancho Panza is a teenage Shawnee orphan hired to guide the strange man in his search. Their haphazard, perilous, and occasionally dreamlike traipse is mesmerizing, as is the complex relationship that develops between the two. Though the ending may come across as formulaic, it is nonetheless dramatically satisfying and doesn’t detract from this otherworldly novel. Agent: Bill Clegg, the Clegg Agency. (Apr.)This review has been corrected; an earlier version had character inaccuracies.
07/01/2018
When widower Cyrus Bellman reads of the discovery of large ancient bones in Kentucky, he becomes obsessed with the idea that giant monsters still exist in the vast unexplored areas beyond the Mississippi. Cyrus leaves his farm and his daughter, Bess, in the care of his sister Julie and gathers supplies, weapons, and trading trinkets as he set out for an adventure into the unknown. The townsfolk and Julie fully expect Cyrus to fail at this preposterous quest. Only Cyrus and Bess expect him ever to return to his Pennsylvania farm. Voice characterizations and narration by Robert Fass propel this fantastic tale. The harshness of wilderness survival and the thoughtless cruelty employed to maintain positions of power are well explored. The characters don't grow much, but the evolving relationship between Cyrus and his young Native American guide is powerful. VERDICT Though listeners may find it hard to empathize with the characters and with Cyrus's obsession, this examination of frontier life is recommended for adult fiction collections. ["This spare first novel…incorporates early American history to lend deep truths to the narrative's alternating stories": LJ 2/1/18 review of the Scribner hc.]—Cliff Glaviano, formerly with Bowling Green State Univ. Libs., OH
★ 2018-02-06
In the early 19th century, a man quests into the American West and finds a world teetering between extinction and dreams.A decade or so after the Lewis and Clark expedition, John Cyrus Bellman, a widower and mule breeder, reads in the newspaper of the discovery of "monstrous bones…sunk in the salty Kentucky mud" and is convinced that "the same gigantic monsters still [walk] the earth in the unexplored territories of the west." Promising to write frequently, Bellman leaves his preteen daughter, Bess, on his Pennsylvania farm and heads west. What follows is the story of Bess' waiting and Bellman's wandering; the story of the letters Bellman sends and their unlucky eastward journeys; the story of Bellman's guide, "an ill-favored, narrow-shouldered Shawnee boy who bore the unpromising name of Old Woman From A Distance" and whose tribe—after being harassed by settlers and paid off in trinkets—has recently undertaken its own less-voluntary western migration. Bess dreams of her father's return while struggling to evade the predatory attentions of two local men. Bellman, a soft-spoken Ahab, suffers winters "harder than he'd thought possible" yet remains enthralled by "the notion that…there were always things…you hadn't dreamed of." Old Woman From A Distance is at once "angry about the past, but ambitious for the future" and must eventually decide whether to undertake a quest of his own. Welsh author Davies' (The Redemption of Galen Pike, 2017, etc.) slim, complex, and achingly beautiful first novel is a sculpture of daring shifts and provocative symmetries welded together by lyrical, fast-paced prose. Davies dispenses with troublesome thousand-mile wildernesses in a sentence and dashes between the minds of both principal and ancillary characters. The result is a choral performance, reminiscent of those by Penelope Fitzgerald: The reader enjoys a story far greater in its sweep and better-linked in its causes than any of that story's participants can appreciate. Deployed on the stage of the midlapsarian American frontier, Davies' chorus manages to weave threads of myth and hope into the gnarly chords of historical tragedy.A masterful first novel—the sort of book that warms even as it devastates, that forces serious reflection and yet charms.
