West: A Novel

Carys Davies

Apr 2018 · Highbridge Audio · Narrated by Robert Fass

About this audiobook

When widowed mule breeder Cy Bellman reads in the newspaper that colossal ancient bones have been discovered in the salty Kentucky mud, he sets out from his small Pennsylvania farm to see for himself if the rumors are true: that the giant monsters are still alive and roam the uncharted wilderness beyond the Mississippi River. Promising to write and to return in two years, he leaves behind his daughter, Bess, to the tender mercies of his taciturn sister and heads west.



With only a barnyard full of miserable animals and her dead mother's gold ring to call her own, Bess, unprotected and approaching womanhood, fills lonely days tracing her father's route on maps at the subscription library and waiting for his letters to arrive. Bellman, meanwhile, wanders farther and farther from home, across harsh and alien landscapes in reckless pursuit of the unknown. From Frank O'Connor Award winner Carys Davies, West is a spellbinding and timeless epic-in-miniature, an eerie parable of the American frontier, and an electric monument to possibility.

Ratings and reviews

I liked the story and the author but it left me feeling it was not complete.

About the author

Carys Davies is the author of two collections of short stories, Some New Ambush and The Redemption of Galen Pike. She is the winner of the 2015 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and the 2015 Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize and the recipient of a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library. She lives in north-west England.

A two-time Audie Award winner, veteran actor Robert Fass is equally at home in a wide variety of styles, genres, characters, and dialects. He has earned multiple AudioFile Earphones Awards, including for his narration of Francisco Goldman's novel Say Her Name.