SOME NEW AMBUSH
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...
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.
Reviews:
‘She is a great short story writer’ —David Sedaris
‘Outstanding’ —The Sunday Times
'Carys Davies is a deft, audacious visionary, a master of the form’ —Téa Obreht
‘[Her] collections Some New Ambush and The Redemption of Galen Pike constantly surprise and delight’ —The New York Times
‘One of the people writing the most interesting short stories at the moment [is] Carys Davies. She has written, I think, the best short short story ever, 'Homecoming 1909'. It's set on the deck of a whaling ship coming into port and it's a page and a half in length and it's really so good and shows what the short story form can do’ —Peter Kemp, The Sunday Times, interviewed by Mariella Frostrup, BBC Open Book
‘Darkly funny and unsettling, with an Attwood-esque prickly wit’ —Boyd Tonkin in The Independent
‘I simply adored Some New Ambush. Having read this and The Redemption of Galen Pike there is no doubt that Carys Davies is my favourite writer of short stories. She can create a character in a single sentence, build complete worlds in a mere paragraph and create entire lives in mere pages’ —Simon Savidge, Savidge Reads
‘Superb…really special… a deeply satisfying combination of original ideas, great feeling for the characters and a strikingly fresh use of language’ —gwales.com with permission from the Welsh Books Council
‘A true original. Her magical yet weirdly believable stories transport you in a breath into other lives and worlds, without a word wasted. Full of surprises’ —Maggie Gee
Shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Prize
Longlisted for the Wales Book of the Year
Finalist for the Calvino Prize
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