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.
