The Travellers and Other Stories: Some New Ambush and The Redemption of Galen Pike

by 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.

Carys Davies was born in Wales, grew up in the Midlands, lived and worked for eleven years in New York and Chicago, and now lives in Lancaster in the north of England. Before turning to fiction she worked for fifteen years as a journalist, mostly in New York and Chicago, writing for the Guardian, Times, Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph and Marie Claire, where she was a contributing editor.

Her short stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and widely published in magazines, anthologies and online, including the Dublin Review, Granta New Writing and the Royal Society of Literature Review.

Davies was the winner of the 2015 Frank O’Connor Award, the 2011 Royal Society of Literature’s V.S. Pritchett Prize and the 2010 Society of Authors’ Olive Cook Award.

‘She can create a micro-world, which has reverberations beyond its size and scope, which is metaphysical.’ Sarah Hall

‘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.’ Elizabeth Harrower

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

252 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 23, 2015

About the author

Carys Davies's debut novel, West, was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, runner-up for the McKitterick Prize, and winner of the Wales Book of the Year for Fiction. Her second novel, The Mission House, was first published in the UK in 2020 where it was The Sunday Times Novel of the Year.

She is also the author of two collections of short stories, Some New Ambush and The Redemption of Galen Pike, which won the 2015 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and the 2015 Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize. She is the recipient of the Royal Society of Literature's V.S. Pritchett Prize, the Society of Authors' Olive Cook Short Story Award, a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library, and is a member of the Folio Academy. Her fiction has been translated into nine languages.

Born in Wales, she grew up there and in the Midlands, lived and worked for twelve years in New York and Chicago, and now lives in Edinburgh.

Reviews

[Carla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Carys Davies' short story collections Some New Ambush and The Redemption of Galen Pike published under one volume. Exquisite stories that are well written. There is something about finishing a story, closing the book, with your finger in place, and relishing what you've just read and enjoyed. Then...onto the next. Every story was different, and wonderful!

[Chambers Stevens · Rating 4 out of 5]

Carys Davies was new to me when I picked up this collection. Which is actually 2 books reprinted into one. Are you a person that thinks they don't like short stories. Well this collection will change your mind. Carys Davies is a master!