I came to read West after reading Davies most recent book, [b:Clear|176443690|Clear|Carys Davies|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1686502013l/176443690.SY75.jpg|183066038], which I loved.

This is a compact book (149 pages) but Davies has packed it with emotions: grief, loneliness, greed, lust, and a man’s yearning to discover giant monsters in the unchartered wilderness beyond the Mississippi River.

Widower, Cy Bellman, leaves behind his ten year old daughter Bess in the care of his taciturn sister to follow his dream. We follow Cy as he faces the rigours of brutal winters and starvation, and Bess as she matures and faces her own dangers. She is lonely and vulnerable, following her father’s route on maps in the local ‘subscription’ library (obviously this town hadn’t a Carnegie Library).

It’s hard to convey in a few short sentences the power of the emotions portrayed in this slim volume. The sense of the great unknown, ‘where there be monsters’, is palpable. In our modern world of google maps it’s easy to forget how terrifying it must have been and how some men couldn’t resist the lure of the unknown.

Clear takes place in 1842, on a tiny, remote island off the north coast of Scotland. Ivar has lived here his entire life, and is now the sole occupant of the island, aside from his elderly horse, a blind cow and some wayward sheep. He has grown accustomed to his simple life where the elements dictate his daily routines.

His quietude is disturbed when he discovers a man unconscious on the beach. He takes him to his home and tends his wounds. Although they have no shared language, the two men begin to find ways to communicate and build a fragile relationship.

Unknown to Ivar, John Ferguson has been sent to the island to evict him so the island can be turned to grazing land for sheep. As they spend more time together, John finds himself drawn to Ivar and cannot find a way to tell him of his true reason for being on the island.

The trauma of these Clearances, which began in the Lowlands in the mid eighteenth century and continued into the second half of the nineteenth in the Highlands and Islands is movingly described by Davies as a ‘vast emptying-out - a long, grey and never-ending procession of tiny figures snaking their way like a river through the country’, leaving behind low houses with ‘roofless hearths open to the rain and the wind and the ghosts of the departed while sheep nosed between the stonework, quietly grazing’.

In a scant 146 pages, Davies gifts us a tender story that explores not only the end of a way of life, but the power of words and how we can touch each other, even when we don’t share a common language. She takes the story in an unexpected direction, exploring what constitutes a family, and what a family can be. Clear is full of hope.