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Summary
Summary
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.
Author Notes
Carys Davies is an Australian author who won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award-the world's richest prize for a short-story collection. Davies won the ¿25,000 (A$37,312) prize for her second collection The Redemption of Galen Pike (Salt Publishing). The prize will be presented to Davies at the closing of the Cork International Short Story Festival in September 2015.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. Bell's Sancho Panza is a teenage Shawnee orphan girl 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.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
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 bonessunk 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 tribeafter being harassed by settlers and paid off in trinketshas 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 thatthere were always thingsyou 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 novelthe sort of book that warms even as it devastates, that forces serious reflection and yet charms. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* You might argue that John Cyrus Bellman is going through a midlife crisis. After all, what would possess a widower with a young daughter, Bess, to leave her behind with her aunt and embark on a seemingly improbable mission across the great American plains, hoping to come across the monster animals he has only read about? News of discovered fossils only adds fuel to his fire, and John sets off on an increasingly perilous journey, befriending a scrawny and clever Shawnee boy. Set in the early nineteenth century, Davies' slender first novel has all the heft of a sprawling western classic. As John's and Bess' paths increasingly diverge, his goals seem like a mirage. He began to feel that he might have broken his life on this journey, that he should have stayed at home with the small and the familiar instead of being out here with the large and the unknown. In a tightly knit, compulsively readable tale, Davies precisely captures the spirit of untamed curiosity and middle-aged ennui that would have us abandon established societal norms and everything we hold dear only to follow our hearts to uncertain outcomes.--Apte, Poornima Copyright 2018 Booklist
Library Journal Review
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 © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
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 . Excerpted from West: A Novel by Carys Davies All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
