Some New Ambush

From the award-winning author of West and The Mission House 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's 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 fulfil 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.

Carys Davies's first novel West 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 and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Her second collection, The Redemption of Galen Pike, won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award 2015. She lives in Edinburgh.