PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Carys Davies is the author of two novels, The Mission House (Granta, 2020) and West (Granta, 2018), which won the Wales Book of the Year Fiction award, was Runner-Up for the Society of Author's McKitterick Prize and was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize. Her short stories have been widely published in magazines and anthologies and broadcast on BBC Radio 4, and have won the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize, the Society of Authors' Olive Cook Award, the Royal Society of Literature's V S Pritchett Prize, and a Northern Writers' Award. Davies' second collection, The Redemption of Galen Pike, won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award 2015.
This intriguing and inventive story escorts the reader to an unexpectedly joyous ending that hints at our contemporary interest in new ideas of what a family might be. The writing style is one of clarity and reserved sensibility punctuated with an end-game needle jab. Not to be missed -- Annie Proulx The sheer beauty of Clear-with its perfect sentences, its austere tenderness, and its quiet sense of disquiet-feels timeless... A poignant, profound depiction of both solitude and connection. Carys Davies has written a masterful, discreetly sublime book -- Hernan Diaz An exquisite, hopeful masterpiece. Magical and humane, it is a celebration of love and courage. It will be my favourite book of 2024, and probably many more years to come -- Rachel Joyce
