West

A Novel

By: Carys Davies

Narrated by: Robert Fass

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.

©2018 Carys Davies (P)2018 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Immediately and completely fascinated throughout this book!

Too short! I want more! Seriously that is part of the delight of this hard-to-stop-listening-to book. Quite probably quite realistic. I will look for more by this author and narrator!

A bit... Simple?

The initial setting and plot reeled me in and had me excited. The end left me wishing for a bit more.

A person would believe that deeply, abandoning his daughter

I like more positive endings, and this wasn’t one of them. The main character was an obsessed idiot. He stayed alive because of a young native man-of-honor, who took care of him. Oh the poor daughter-what secret she decided to keep. However, beyond all that, it was well-written. Obviously I believed the author’s story.