The Travellers and Other Stories
Carys Davies
Carys Davies’ short story collections Some New Ambush and The Redemption of Galen Pike (winner of the 2015 Frank O'Connor Award), now published in a single volume.
In a remote Australian settlement a young wife with an untellable secret reluctantly invites her neighbour into her home. On a red island in a rose-coloured sea, russet-haired women dream of a fisherman with hair black as night. A Quaker spinster offers companionship to a condemned man in a Colorado jail. Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins visit a women’s asylum, and the course of literary history is changed forever.
Spare, precise and charged with wit, these award-winning stories are set in places near, far and imaginary. Carys Davies takes us to a world where the lines between reality and fantasy, tragedy and comedy, madness and sanity begin to dissolve.
Combining two collections—Some New Ambush and Frank O'Connor Award-winner The Redemption of Galen Pike—The Travellers and Other Stories is a work of exceptional talent and original vision.
‘[The stories are] beautifully crafted, exquisitely realised pieces that together ask us to be better readers by radically re-thinking sea-farers’ legends, fairy-tales, myths, heroes’ stories, frontier fables, urban myths and other tales whose roots lie in the oral tradition.’ Ladette Randolph, editor of Ploughshares and one of the three judges of the Frank O’Connor Award speaking at the ceremony. Read the full speech here.
Some New Ambush
Hwang
Waking the Princess
Monday Diary
Gingerbread Boy
Rose Red
The Captain’s Daughter
Pied Piper
Boot
Scouting for Boys
Homecoming, 1909
Historia Calamitatum Mearum
Metamorphosis
In Skokie
The Visitors
Ugly Sister
The Redemption of Galen Pike
The Quiet
On Commercial Hill
Jubilee
The Travellers
Myth
Bonnet
First Journeyman
Precious
The Taking of Bunny Clay
Miracle at Hawk’s Bay
In the Cabin in the Woods
The Coat
The Redemption of Galen Pike
Wicked Fairy
Creed
Nothing Like My Nightmare
Sibyl
andThe Travellers and Other Stories
‘She can create a micro-world, which has reverberations beyond its size and scope, which is metaphysical.’
‘These stories are so unexpected and compelling it’s difficult to find one single word to praise them. Carys Davies deserves every accolade she has received.’
‘The Travellers and Other Stories is filled with tales as piquant and witty as they are suffused with tenderness and empathy.’
