Clear by Carys Davies

Carys Davies grew up in Newport, south Wales but her novels have been set in 19th- century Pennsylvania (West, 2018), contemporary Ooty in India (The Mission House, 2020) and now a small island off the north coast of Scotland in 1843. Her short stories have been set variously in the Australian outback and Siberia. She has said that when creating a fictional world, ‘I seem to require a certain kind of distance from my own life’.

On an island ‘between Shetland and Norway’, a man called Ivar lives in isolation, talking only to Pegi the horse, whom he calls ‘old cabbage and a silly, odd-looking person’. One day he finds a man naked and unconscious on the beach below the cliffs. Even after the man regains consciousness, he and Ivar do not share a common language, so communication between them is halting. The newcomer is John Ferguson, a church minister who has been sent to evict Ivar so that the land can be used solely by grazing sheep.

The Mission House by Carys Davies

Carys Davies has followed her highly praised debut, West, with another jewel of a novel. Hilary Byrd is a man dogged by “bad days” who seeks refuge in Ooty, a hill station in south India much prized by the British soldiers who first rode up there in 1819 and decided to build “a little corner of England. A place to rest in, out of the heat, and be comfortable and cool.” The evocation of a 1950s British idyll in India is so persuasive that it comes as a shock to read the word “email” – this, it transpires, is a novel set in the present day.

“The gingerbread eaves of the post office” in Ooty soothe Byrd, who is haunted by the memory of an elderly man calling him a “bald cunt” in the library where he’d worked for 25 years in south-east London. His only company now is Jamshed, the rickshaw driver who transports him around the small town, the Padre and his adoptive daughter, Priscilla, who live next to Byrd. Priscilla was born with no thumbs and a short right leg; when the Padre suggests he must find a good match for her, Byrd’s heart leaps at the idea this could be his destiny.