The Mission House

The Mission House puts another genre, Raj fiction, to fresh purposes... The prevailing tone modulates between gentle humour and low-key poignancy... Subtle with nuance and alive with immediacy, again adroitly using small-scale effects to enlarge understanding and extend empathy, the resulting novel is a masterly achievement * Sunday Times *
A novel about the pitfalls of human connection in contemporary India... Davies's use of [language] reveals an ear finely tuned to subcontinental peculiarities... The Mission House is an interesting take on a familiar trope: the westerner who finds in India deliverance from the wasteland of modernity * Guardian *
Brilliantly crafted... Having subtly prepared the ground, Davies finally springs the jaws of her plot, revealing, heartbreakingly, to us and the tragically blinkered Hilary, what kind of story this really is * Daily Mail *
A delicately political tale that keeps the real drama largely below the surface, leaving the reader to gauge the extent of the protagonist's self-deluding solipsism * Metro *
The Mission House is an absolute triumph. That rare type of book - resoundingly tender, and gently heart-wrenching. Carys Davies doesn't drop a sentence. I was deeply moved, and spellbound -- Cynan Jones
An astonishingly assured and gripping piece of work and a worthy follow-up to WEST. Davies has a voice unlike any I've read: clean, otherworldly, eerily original, and capable of devastating effect -- Julie Myerson
A compelling read. Carys Davies has an amazing gift for summoning up a place, a situation, the characters. Her skill is that of brevity, nailing a personality with a few lines of dialogue, saying most by saying least -- Penelope Lively
I felt, reading this extraordinary novel, that the thorough oddity of its chief characters, their strange innocence, amounts to a revolt, on our behalf too, against the stupidity, cruelty, fanaticism and bigoted violence of the world in which they more or less successfully live their eccentric lives -- David Constantine
Carys Davies' enthralling fictions carry us across time and continents, and bring interior worlds to life -- Clare Messud
Tender, playful, piercing, light-footed-this is an irresistible novel -- Michelle de Kretser
Davies weaves her story with brevity and to devastating effect, drawing a portrait of an odd group of lonely people struggling to find a connection in a changing world * Radio Times *
A wonderfully written tale of subtle repetitions from multiple points of view set in India - it has the simplicity of fairy tale, the heft of fable and contains all the human sadness and joy of misfits -- Bernard MacLaverty