West
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4.0 • 13 Ratings
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- £11.99
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- £11.99
Publisher Description
Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2019
When Cy Bellman, American settler and widowed father of Bess, reads in the newspaper that huge ancient bones have been discovered in a Kentucky swamp, he leaves his small Pennsylvania farm and young daughter to find out if the rumours are true: that the giant monsters are still alive, and roam the uncharted wilderness beyond the Mississippi River.
West is the story of Bellman's journey and of Bess, waiting at home for her father to return. Written with compassionate tenderness and magical thinking, it explores the courage of conviction, the transformative power of grief, the desire for knowledge and the pull of home, from an exceptionally talented and original British writer. It is a radiant and timeless epic-in-miniature, an eerie, electric monument to possibility.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her transfixing first novel, Davies (author of the story collection The Redemption of Galen Pike) tells a stark story about exploration and extinction on the American continent. Driven by wanderlust to leave his small British village, Cy Bellman sets up a mule farm in rural Pennsylvania in the early 19th century. Reports of the discovery of large fossils in the Kentucky mud, "bones... that were bleached and pale and vast, like a wrecked fleet or the parched ribs of a church roof," kindles his imagination more than his farm's jennies and jacks: "it seemed possible that, through the giant animals, a door into the mystery of the world would somehow be opened." Davies conveys the simultaneous ridiculousness and nobility of Bellman's obsession, which compels this Don Quixote in a stovepipe hat to leave his daughter to determine whether mammoth beasts still wander the nation's vast western expanse. Bellman's Sancho Panza is a teenage Shawnee orphan hired to guide the strange man in his search. Their haphazard, perilous, and occasionally dreamlike traipse is mesmerizing, as is the complex relationship that develops between the two. Though the ending may come across as formulaic, it is nonetheless dramatically satisfying and doesn't detract from this otherworldly novel.
