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1,122 ratings
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.
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ISBN-10
1501179357
ISBN-13
978-1501179358
Print length
160 pages
Language
English
Publisher
Scribner
Publication date
April 01, 2019
Dimensions
5.25 x 0.6 x 8 inches
Item weight
2.31 pounds
ASIN :
B074ZRKPQN
File size :
6290 KB
Text-to-speech :
Enabled
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Supported
Enhanced typesetting :
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Not Enabled
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Enabled
“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
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West
From what she could see he had two guns, a hatchet, a knife, his rolled blanket, the big tin chest, various bags and bundles, one of which, she supposed, contained her mother’s things.
“How far must you go?”
“That depends.”
“On where they are?”
“Yes.”
“So how far? A thousand miles? More than a thousand miles?”
“More than a thousand miles, I think so, Bess, yes.”
Bellman’s daughter was twirling a loose thread that hung down from his blanket, which until this morning had lain upon his bed. She looked up at him. “And then the same back.”
“The same back, yes.”
She was quiet a moment, and there was a serious, effortful look about her, as if she was trying to imagine a journey of such magnitude. “That’s a long way.”
“Yes, it is.”
“But worth it if you find them.”
“I think so, Bess. Yes.”
He saw her looking at his bundles and his bags and the big tin chest, and wondered if she was thinking about Elsie’s things. He hadn’t meant her to see him packing them.
She was drawing a circle in the muddy ground with the toe of her boot. “So how long will you be gone? A month? More than a month?”
Bellman shook his head and took her hand. “Oh, Bess, yes, more than a month. A year at least. Maybe two.”
Bess nodded. Her eyes smarted. This was much longer than she’d expected, much longer than she’d hoped.
“In two years I will be twelve.”
“Twelve, yes.” He lifted her up then and kissed her forehead and told her goodbye, and in another moment he was aloft on his horse in his brown wool coat and his high black hat, and then he was off down the stony track that led away from the house, already heading in a westerly direction.
“Look you long and hard, Bess, at the departing figure of your father,” said her aunt Julie from the porch in a loud voice like a proclamation.
“Regard him, Bess, this person, this fool, my brother, John Cyrus Bellman, for you will not clap eyes upon a greater one. From today I am numbering him among the lost and the mad. Do not expect that you will see him again, and do not wave, it will only encourage him and make him think he deserves your good wishes. Come inside now, child, close the door, and forget him.”
For a long time Bess stood, ignoring the words of her aunt Julie, watching her father ride away.
In her opinion he did not resemble any kind of fool.
In her opinion he looked grand and purposeful and brave. In her opinion he looked intelligent and romantic and adventurous. He looked like someone with a mission that made him different from other people, and for as long as he was gone she would hold this picture of him in her mind: up there on his horse with his bags and his bundles and his weapons—up there in his long coat and his stovepipe hat, heading off into the west.
She did not ever doubt that she would see him again.
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Carys Davies
www.carysdavies.net
Carys Davies’s debut novel West (2018) 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. Her second novel The Mission House was first published in the UK in 2020 where it was The Sunday Times 2020 Novel of the Year.
She is also the author of two collections of short stories, Some New Ambush and The Redemption of Galen Pike, which won the 2015 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and the 2015 Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize. She is the recipient of the Royal Society of Literature's V.S. Pritchett Prize, the Society of Authors' Olive Cook Short Story Award, a Northern Writers’ Award, a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library, and is a member of the Folio Academy. Her fiction has been translated into nine languages.
Born in Wales, she grew up there and in the Midlands, lived and worked for twelve years in New York and Chicago, and now lives in Edinburgh.
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Customer reviews
4 out of 5
1,122 global ratings
Englishman in New York
5
West is like a time bomb
Reviewed in the United States on May 5, 2018
Verified Purchase
West is like a time bomb. I read it one week-end loving the narrative and the prose style. Later on reflection, I was jolted by a succession of explosions as I appreciated deeper and deeper insights that had been planted in my mind by Davies . For example, the disappearing culture of the Shawnee boy and the taming of the West made me think back on how the world has changed over my lifetime due to globalization. Davies has a gift for exploring profound universal issues through the intimate lens of the psyches of a handful of carefully crafted characters. Don't be fooled by her gentle style as she will shake your comfortable worldview profoundly. By leaving it to the reader to join the dots, West is a refreshing change from the shrill voices of so many writers with a message.
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12 people found this helpful
Red Ryder
5
There Is No Sign of Him
Reviewed in the United States on February 1, 2024
Verified Purchase
So simple. So uncomplicated. Carys Davies so good. I’m not tempted to offer an overview of this novel. No one would believe it could be worth reading. But trust me her characters are truly believable, three will touch the reader. The strength her characters present will perhaps offer the reader an understanding of what it took to settle, capture this country. And I believe all that you think, feel about this novel might very well surprise you. Bravo, Ms Davies.
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A reader
5
A moving story about a man in search of the unknown
Reviewed in the United States on June 22, 2018
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I really loved this novel. Even the minor characters were brought to life. I particularly liked the character Old Woman From A Distance. There was a lot of emotion evoked without any sappy description.
Mary A. Wilson
5
brilliant debut
Reviewed in the United States on May 23, 2018
Verified Purchase
one of the things you can say about this novel is that at no point can you with certainty predict the ending. so, although everything that happens is logical and flows from a to b in a predictable manner, nothing is predictable. I loved it.
3 people found this helpful
mrthinkndrink
4
Just as the very intriguing foundation is laid, the story screeches to a halt
Reviewed in the United States on August 13, 2018
Verified Purchase
3.5 stars would have been my choice. The story is intriguing if at times overwrought and at other times undernourished. A father and widower in the early 1800s becomes consumed with the possibility of mega fauna still roaming the American west, so leaves his ten year old daughter on their farm in western Pennsylvania, in the care of his spinster sister, while he heads into the wilderness in the wake of Lewis and Clark. At times the language seems derivative of Cormac McCarthy, though not as finely done. The story bounces between Cy Bellman, the father, and Bess, his daughter back home. To her credit, Davies raises many serious points: what kind of love (or selfishness) would permit a supposedly loving father to abandon his daughter, what is the affect on one's psyche of losing a young and vibrant spouse, what kind of life did women suffer in that society, how were girls mistreated and misvalued, to coin a word, and what level of blame or responsibility does a conquering force (white Europeans) accept or need to accept for the destruction of indigenous cultures (American Indian). The book is short and the ending was abrupt. These important themes could have been explored in much greater detail over a longer period of time. The truncated story was ultimately unsatisfying, merely raising important issues without seeking any fuller understanding or resolution.
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4 people found this helpful
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