The Mission House — Carys Davies

In a remote Australian settlement a young wife with an untellable secret reluctantly invites her neighbour into her home. A Quaker spinster offers companionship to a condemned man in a Colorado jail. In the ice and snows of Siberia an office employee from Birmingham witnesses a scene that will change her life. A teenage daughter leaves home in search of adventure. High in the Cumbrian fells a woman seeks help from her father’s enemy.

Spare, precise, charged with a prickly wit, the stories in Carys Davies's sparkling second collection remind us how little we know of the lives of others.

Reviews:

‘Outstanding’ —The Sunday Times

‘Absolutely magnificent’ —Elizabeth Macneal

'Carys Davies is a deft, audacious visionary, a master of the form’ —Téa Obreht

‘She is a great short story writer’ —David Sedaris

‘Oh my God! Oh my God! It was so great! The Redemption of Galen Pike. A collection of short stories. I never read short stories. This book is so wonderful… It's fantastic!’ —Sarah Jessica Parker

‘Confirms beyond doubt her position among the finest British exponents of a particularly challenging form’ —The Irish Examiner

‘Outstanding’ —Akhil Sharma

‘Beautiful, transgressive tales of people colliding with the world.' —Ian McMillan

‘Magnificent…The Redemption of Galen Pike is a stunning achievement, and Carys Davies a writer to celebrate’ —Toronto Star

‘A perfectly formed gem… The book never falters in its delicate touch and confident, nuanced observations about the human condition’ —Publishers Weekly Starred Review

‘[Her] collections Some New Ambush and The Redemption of Galen Pike constantly surprise and delight’ —The New York Times

‘These are absolutely perfect… They’re always a little bit dark, a little bit odd, always absolutely beautiful and hard to forget.’ —The Thread, Minnesota Public Radio

‘Outstanding... perfectly distilled, intense... exquisite’ —The Yorkshire Post

‘This delicate, magical collection won the Frank O’Connor Award for Short Stories and the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize and it’s easy to see why. They are precise but full of beautifully observed details that fill compact vignettes with incident and emotion.’ —Daily Express

‘Extraordinary… heart-stopping… Like all good stories, these tales expand and reverberate beyond the page, pulsating with Life. Davies’ voice – witty, offbeat, crackling with intelligence – is entirely her own’ —New Welsh Review

‘Beautiful… superbly elegant. Davies achieves that miraculous thing - being endlessly unexpected without being unbelievable… [She] manages to create vast worlds within only a few sentences.’ —www.gwales.com with permission from the Welsh Books Council

‘Completely stole my heart… Every story in this stunning collection is a gem and completely unlike what follows or precedes it. Davies’ diversity shows no bounds as she takes us from jails in the Wild West to a meeting with Queen Victoria, from Australian isolated farms to snowy Siberia where each time we meet fantastic characters with unlikely and unexpected tales to tell. I loved every single one’ —Simon Savidge, Savidge Reads

‘Concise, beautifully crafted, exquisitely realised pieces…Davies’ stories feel like those told around camp fires and hearths, on shipboard, in sheepherders’ huts and around kitchen tables. They seem familiar while at the same time wholly fresh and original…even as we broadly think we know where these stories are going, we can’t stop reading for the beauty and confidence of the prose. Like Chekhov's great stories Davies' stories are deceptively simple. They reward re-reading not by resolving the core mystery, but by revealing layers of meaning and complexity’ —Ladette Randolph, editor-in-chief of Ploughshares and Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award judge

‘A writer willing to tackle the hardest of all fictional forms – the short story. This is a region in which so many fail … She can do what it is essential to do in this form, 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 had received’ —Elizabeth Harrower

‘Rooted in local realities, Carys Davies’s characters live lives that are, in Keats’s phrase, “like the scriptures, figurative.” And her writing is an act not of transfiguration, but of revelation’ —David Constantine

‘The stories in The Redemption of Galen Pike are tiny marvels of technique and language … [it] feels startlingly original, in part precisely because of the restraint the author exhibits. Davies’s technically accomplished, glancing tales offer the frisson of the unexpected’ —The Globe & Mail

‘It’s little wonder that Davies was winner of the 2015 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, a prize previously given to the likes of Yiyun Li, Jhumpa Lahiri, Haruki Murakami and Edna O’Brien. The Redemption of Galen Pike is a stunning achievement, and Carys Davies a writer to celebrate.’ —Toronto Star

‘This is a slim collection of stories but oh it be mighty! Each story is a gem, a wildly imaginative look at the hardships and beauty of life. Davies infuses each interesting tale with raw emotion and observations as her characters grapple with the unpredictability of the world’ —Liberty Hardy, Book Riot

‘Davies’s stories plumb the depths of silence and estrangement, bringing up moments of extraordinary insight about what holds people together and what drives them apart’ —Laurie Greer, Politics & Prose Bookstore

‘A truly original and striking collection… Here is a remarkable voice.' —The Frank O’Connor Short Story Award judges