Clear | Granta

  • Published: 07/03/2024
  • ISBN: 9781803510408
  • Granta Books
  • 160 pages

Clear

Carys Davies

1843. On a remote Scottish island, Ivar, the sole occupant, leads a life of quiet isolation until the day he finds a man unconscious on the beach below the cliffs. The newcomer is John Ferguson, an impoverished church minister sent to evict Ivar and turn the island into grazing land for sheep. Unaware of the stranger’s intentions, Ivar takes him into his home, and in spite of the two men having no common language, a fragile bond begins to form between them. Meanwhile on the mainland, John’s wife Mary anxiously awaits news of his mission.

Against the rugged backdrop of this faraway spot beyond Shetland, Carys Davies’s intimate drama unfolds with tension and tenderness: a touching and crystalline study of ordinary people buffeted by history and a powerful exploration of the distances and connections between us. Perfectly structured and surprising at every turn, Clear is a marvel of storytelling, an exquisite short novel by a master of the form.

The Welsh novelist writes epics in miniature... It is a tender, humane book

Johanna Thomas-Corr, Sunday Times

Clear is a love letter to the scorching power of language, a power that Davies has long understood... Davies is a writer of immense talent and deep humanity, capable of balancing devastating audacity with equally devastating restraint

Clare Clark, Guardian

A compact, taut and brilliant novel with an ingenious premise. The book is about belonging, a dying language, secrets, and a pistol in a box. I loved every page

Anthony Doerr

The Author

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.

More about the author →

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‘All good stories are both resonant and concrete; they live in the mind of the reader and reverberate beyond the pages of the book.’