The Mission House by Carys Davies
THE SUNDAY TIMES NOVEL OF THE YEAR 2020 'A compelling read. Carys Davies has an amazing gift' Penelope Lively From the prize-winning author of West, a collision between old and new, east and west, in a former British hill station in South India. Fleeing the dark undercurrents of his 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. As Hilary's friendship with the young woman grows, he begins to wonder whether his purpose lies in this new relationship. But religious and nationalist tensions are brewing and the mission house may not be the safe haven it seems... 'Brilliantly crafted' Daily Mail 'An absolute triumph' Cynan Jones 'Subtle with nuance and alive with immediacy' Sunday Times
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
The potential for love intersects with questions of faith in this bold yet subtle new book from the award-winning author, Carys Davies. Furthermore, it explores how the colonial past and present still co-exist in the modern world * Happy magazine *
Rich and vivid. Davies's tale feels timeless * Times *
Beautifully done... resonant... haunting -- Novel of the Year * Sunday Times *
Quietly tragic... The power of Davies' novel lies in her articulation of that disjunction as Byrd continuously fails to genuinely engage with the people in front of him, preferring, almost subconsciously, to perpetuate an outdated vision of a country that never existed in the first place * Irish 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
The potential for love intersects with questions of faith in this bold yet subtle new book from the award-winning author, Carys Davies. Furthermore, it explores how the colonial past and present still co-exist in the modern world * Happy magazine *
Rich and vivid. Davies's tale feels timeless * Times *
Beautifully done... resonant... haunting -- Novel of the Year * Sunday Times *
Quietly tragic... The power of Davies' novel lies in her articulation of that disjunction as Byrd continuously fails to genuinely engage with the people in front of him, preferring, almost subconsciously, to perpetuate an outdated vision of a country that never existed in the first place * Irish Times *
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.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781783784301 |
| ISBN 10 | 178378430X |
| Title | The Mission House |
| Author | Carys Davies |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Granta Books |
| Year published | 2020-08-06 |
| Number of pages | 256 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |