Product Description

"Some New Ambush" is the first collection of short stories from award-winning writer Carys Davies. Love, loss, birth, death, betrayal, madness, they all lie in wait for Davies' characters in their startlingly different worlds: a dry cleaner's shop in contemporary Chicago, a mining town in South Wales in the sixties, a lunatic asylum in nineteenth century northern England. Shot through with wit and aching emotional poignancy, these stories tell of how we attempt to confront the things life throws in our path often when we least expect them, and in places where we never thought to look. They tell of the mistakes we make along the way, and of how we try to deal with the whole difficult, unpredictable business. There is the boy who steps into his best friend's clothes in a desperate bid to fulfill his dreams, the man who comes up with an amazing new invention to win the heart of the woman he loves, the bored young wife doomed to live on an island where everything is red, the middle-aged woman who finds a baby in the sand and passes it off as her own.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #254344 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

Review
Already known for its poetry, Salt is developing an ever-stronger short-story list as well. The 15 pieces in Carys Davies's darkly funny and unsettling collection usually begin with "quite small things", only to edge gently into an emotional abyss in dank Welsh towns, airless Victorian parlours or mouldering libraries. The half-hidden passions of "Ugly Sister" could be a lost slice of Dylan Thomas, while the ousted Latin teacher of "Historia Calamatitum Mearum" has an Atwood-esque prickly wit that surfaces elsewhere. Arrivals and departures often trigger crises -- but then, as "Metamorphosis" puts it, "Take-off and landing are the most dangerous times" -- Boyd Tonkin The Independent The stories move seamlessly between the familiar and the surreal, between reality and fantasy, sanity and madness... The attention is focused as through a magnifying glass and we are hooked, drawn into an imaginary world of which we wish to know more... her spare, concise, clear style is ideally suited to a genre in which every word must earn its keep. -- Hazel Watson Book Club Reviews -- Bromley local meeting

About the Author
Carys Davies won second prize in the inaugural 2002 Orange Harpers & Queen Short Story Competition, second prize in the 2005 Asham Award, and runner-up prizes in the 2005 Bridport Prize and the 2006 Fish Short Histories Prize. Her stories have appeared in prize anthologies, in The London Magazine, and in a variety of U.S. literary magazines, including New Letters, Kestrel and G.W. Review. Some New Ambush is her first story collection.

Customer Reviews

My best find this Autumn
These stories are brilliant - they are funny, sad and always suprising. I loved them.