From the prize-winning author of West, a collision between old and new, east and west, in a former British hill station in contemporary South India.
Carys Davies's first novel West (Granta, 2018) 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. They 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, and her second collection, The Redemption of Galen Pike, won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award 2015.
The Mission House puts another genre, Raj fiction, to fresh
purposes... The prevailing tone modulates between gentle humour and
low-key poignancy... Subtle with nuance and alive with immediacy,
again adroitly using small-scale effects to enlarge understanding
and extend empathy, the resulting novel is a masterly
achievement
*Sunday Times*
A novel about the pitfalls of human connection in contemporary
India... Davies's use of [language] reveals an ear finely tuned to
subcontinental peculiarities... The Mission House is an interesting
take on a familiar trope: the westerner who finds in India
deliverance from the wasteland of modernity
*Guardian*
Brilliantly crafted... Having subtly prepared the ground, Davies
finally springs the jaws of her plot, revealing, heartbreakingly,
to us and the tragically blinkered Hilary, what kind of story this
really is
*Daily Mail*
A delicately political tale that keeps the real drama largely below
the surface, leaving the reader to gauge the extent of the
protagonist's self-deluding solipsism
*Metro*
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*
Carys Davies' enthralling fictions carry us across time and
continents, and bring interior worlds to life
*Clare Messud*
Tender, playful, piercing, light-footed-this is an irresistible
novel
*Michelle de Kretser*
Davies weaves her story with brevity and to devastating effect,
drawing a portrait of an odd group of lonely people struggling to
find a connection in a changing world
*Radio Times*
A wonderfully written tale of subtle repetitions from multiple
points of view set in India - it has the simplicity of fairy tale,
the heft of fable and contains all the human sadness and joy of
misfits
*Bernard MacLaverty*
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