The Mission House
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Fleeing the dark undercurrents of contemporary life in Britain, Hilary Byrd takes refuge in Ooty, a hill station in South India. There he finds solace in life’s simple pleasures, travelling by rickshaw around the small town with his driver Jamshed and staying in a mission house beside the local presbytery where the Padre and his adoptive daughter Priscilla have taken Hilary under their wing.
The Padre is concerned for Priscilla's future, and as Hilary's friendship with the young woman grows, he begins to wonder whether his purpose lies in this new relationship. But religious tensions are brewing and the mission house may not be the safe haven it seems.
The Mission House boldly and imaginatively explores post-colonial ideas in a world fractured between faith and non-belief, young and old, imperial past and nationalistic present. Tenderly subversive and meticulously crafted, it is a deeply human fable of the wonders and terrors of connection in a modern world.
Carys Davies’s debut novel, West, was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, runner-up for the Society of Authors’ McKitterick Prize and winner of the Wales Book of the Year for Fiction. She is also the author of two collections of short stories, Some New Ambush and The Redemption of Galen Pike (published in Australia as the single collection The Travellers and Other Stories), which won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize. She lives in Edinburgh.
‘The Mission House is an absolute triumph. That rare type of book—resoundingly tender, and gently heart-wrenching. Carys Davies doesn't drop a sentence. I was deeply moved, and spellbound.’ Cynan Jones
‘An astonishingly assured and gripping piece of work and a worthy follow-up to West. Davies has a voice unlike any I’ve read: clean, otherworldly, eerily original, and capable of devastating effect’ Julie Myerson
‘A compelling read. Carys Davies has an amazing gift for summoning up a place, a situation, the characters. Her skill is that of brevity, nailing a personality with a few lines of dialogue, saying most by saying least’ Penelope Lively
‘I felt, reading this extraordinary novel, that the thorough oddity of its chief characters, their strange innocence, amounts to a revolt, on our behalf too, against the stupidity, cruelty, fanaticism and bigoted violence of the world in which they more or less successfully live their eccentric lives’ David Constantine
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Davies follows up West with a stunning, understated novel set in a former British hill station in contemporary Tamil Nadu, India. Hilary Byrd, a 51-year-old British former librarian who lost his job following a mental breakdown and rues the "tapping of keyboards and the singing of babies and the hysterical shouting of the drunk and the angry" that came to define the library where he worked, has come to India for a change of scenery. He ends up in the hill town, and upon meeting the Padre, a Christian Indian and the local clergyman, he's invited to stay in Canadian missionary's temporarily vacant bungalow. Byrd, alternately hopeful and despairing, is ferried around by Jamshed, an old rickshaw driver who listens patiently to Byrd's monologues about his own life's wrong turns and his enchantment with the town's "combination of the strange and familiar." Byrd falls in love with the Padre's young housekeeper, Priscilla, while Priscilla is captivated by Jamshed's nephew and his passion for American country music. However, while Byrd putters around obliviously, resentment toward Christians in India grows alongside Hindu nationalism, and the affable Padre and Priscilla find themselves threatened, a situation that involves Byrd in an unsettling denouement. Told from alternating perspectives, this captivating, nuanced tale balances a pervading sense of melancholy with pockets of wry humor. Davies's masterly elegy is not to be missed.
