The Redemption of Galen Pike

Winner of the 2015 International Frank O'Connor Short Story Award Winner of the 2015 Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize Shortlisted for the 2015 Wales Book of the Year: Fiction Shortlisted for the 2015 Edge Hill Short Story Prize The Globe 100: The Best International Fiction of 2017 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.

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.