The Redemption of Galen Pike and Other Stories

In a remote Australian settlement a young wife with an untellable secret reluctantly invites her neighbour into her home. A Quaker spinster offers companionship to a condemned man in a Colorado jail. In the ice and snows of Siberia an office employee from Birmingham witnesses a scene that will change her life. At a jubilee celebration in a northern English town a middle-aged alderman opens his heart to Queen Victoria. A teenage daughter leaves home in search of adventure. High in the Cumbrian fells a woman seeks help from her father’s enemy.

Spare, precise, charged with a prickly wit, the stories in Carys Davies’s sparkling second collection remind us how little we know of the lives of others.

Praise for Carys Davies

“extraordinarily powerful” — VS PRITCHETT PRIZE JUDGES JANE GARDAM, PENELOPE LIVELY AND JACOB ROSS

“darkly funny and unsettling” —BOYD TONKIN The Independent on Some New Ambush

“As if Mark Twain and Annie Proulx had sat down at a desk together [….] I shall be looking out for more.” —PIERS PLOWRIGHT

“a writer willing to tackle the hardest of all fictional forms – the short story. This is a region in which so many fail […] she can do what it is essential to do in this form, she can create a micro-world, which has reverberations beyond its size and scope, which is metaphysical.” —SARAH HALL

CARYS DAVIES was the winner of the the 2010 Society of Authors’ Olive Cook Short Story Award, the 2011 Royal Society of Literature’s V S Pritchett Memorial Prize, and a 2013 Northern Writers’ Award. She has been shortlisted and longlisted for many other prizes including the Calvino Prize, the Manchester Fiction Prize, the Roland Mathias Prize, the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, the Wales Book of the Year and the William Trevor/Elizabeth Bowen Prize. Born in Wales, she now lives in Lancaster.

By the same author

SHORT STORIES

Some New Ambush

Published by Salt Publishing Ltd

12 Norwich Road, Cromer, Norfolk NR27 0AX

Copyright © Carys Davies, 2014

The right of Carys Davies to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Salt Publishing.

Salt Publishing 2014

This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 978-1-84471-994-5 electronic

for Michael

The Quiet

The Quiet

SHE DIDN’T HEAR him arrive.