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Carys Davies' short story collections Some New Ambush and The Redemption of Galen Pike (winner of the 2015 Frank O'Connor Award), now published in a single volume. In a remote Australian settlement a young wife with an untellable secret reluctantly invites her neighbour into her home. On a red island in a rose-coloured sea, russet-haired women dream of a fisherman with hair black as night. A Quaker spinster offers companionship to a condemned man in a Colorado jail. Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins visit a women's asylum, and the course of literary history is changed forever. Spare, precise and charged with wit, these award-winning stories are set in places near, far and imaginary. Carys Davies takes us to a world where the lines between reality and fantasy, tragedy and comedy, madness and sanity begin to dissolve. Combining two collections-Some New Ambush and Frank O'Connor Award-winner The Redemption of Galen Pike-The Travellers and Other Stories is a work of exceptional talent and original vision. Carys Davies was born in Wales, grew up in the Midlands, lived and worked for eleven years in New York and Chicago, and now lives in Lancaster in the north of England. Before turning to fiction she worked for fifteen years as a journalist, mostly in New York and Chicago, writing for the Guardian, Times, Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph and Marie Claire, where she was a contributing editor. Her short stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and widely published in magazines, anthologies and online, including the Dublin Review, Granta New Writing and the Royal Society of Literature Review. Davies was the winner of the 2015 Frank O'Connor Award, the 2011 Royal Society of Literature's V.S. Pritchett Prize and the 2010 Society of Authors' Olive Cook Award. 'She can create a micro-world, which has reverberations beyond its size and scope, which is metaphysical.' Sarah Hall 'These stories are so unexpected and compelling it's difficult to find one single word to praise them. Carys Davies deserves every accolade she has received.' Elizabeth Harrower.