Horsey Lit-Fic (That'll Make You Feel Something)

For too long, we've been plagued by a lack of choice: we all want to read books that feature horses prominently, but in order to do so, generally, you've got to decide between biting your tongue as the main character 'puts the reigns [sic] in her horse's mouth' or fighting the inevitable brain-mush that comes with consuming too much poorly-written literature. (Sorry, James Patterson, we're looking at you and The Horsewoman here.)

But seek and ye shall find, bookworms: there are beautifully crafted pieces of literary fiction out there that involve horses. They're just a little bit hard to track down, that's all. That's why we're on a mission to bring them all to you this summer and boost that TBR pile. First up? Horsey lit-fic that'll send you on an emotional rollercoaster. Or a spiral. One of the two. 

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Barn Blind by Jane Smiley

Buy it here.

Few authors of horsey books have quite the same credentials – on either side of the horseman/writer divide – as Jane Smiley. As a writer, she’s prolific, with thirty books to her name so far, and she’s lauded, too, with a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, won in 1992 for her retelling of King Lear, A Thousand Acres. As a horsewoman, she’s been involved with racing for decades, breeding and owning Thoroughbreds herself as well as riding and competing.

That means that her writing won’t make you want to claw your eyes out and when she throws around a bit of equine terminology, you won’t cringe – which is great news, because no small percentage of her output is set in the horse world. Her best for horse-lovers is, probably, Horse Heaven, which has a crap name but a brilliant concept, and flits through a huge ensemble of characters in the American flat-racing world, including, sometimes, going into the minds of the horses themselves.

But our deep-cut pick for the lit-fic reader who wants to feel some kind of way is 1980’s Barn Blind. Smiley is at her best when unpacking complicated, messy families, and the Karlson family at the centre of her debut is exactly that. Set on a 300-acre, 40-horse farm in rural America, the book – like the family themselves – orbits around mother Kate, a hard-edged devotee of top-level training, who committed herself to the process but never reached the heights she’d hoped for. Now, she’s putting her showjumping dreams and Olympic expectations onto her children – but at what cost?

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Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan

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This is an odd, brilliant little book written in a fascinating way: it’s not really autofiction, because it’s not the author’s own life that’s unpacked, but it does take real life and spin it into a yarn.

Scanlan conducted a series of interviews with ‘Sonia’, a midwestern racetrack employee, and has turned them into a series of vignettes and memories documenting the woman’s life on the track. It’s not always an easy read – there are bleak and brutal descriptions of sexual abuse and animal injury – but it’s a beautifully-done and honest one.

There’s no plot, necessarily, but instead, this is an exercise in stepping into another life, and another mind – and Sonia’s stoic, sparse eulogies will leave you thinking about what goes on behind the scenes long after you’ve closed this very short book.

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The Skin is the Elastic Covering That Encases the Entire Body by Bjørn Rasmussen

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‘Skin’ is, like Kick the Latch, a very slim book, and one based on real life, but it’s an even heavier-going read. Will you enjoy it? Probably not, or not in any ordinary sense, anyway. Will it make you think? Absolutely.

Translated from the original Danish – often in a knotty, tangled sort of way – it follows a teenaged Bjørn as he grapples with his sexuality and mental health. There’s a poetry, and a stream of consciousness, to the way it’s written that can make it meander out of your grasp, but when it returns, it so often does so with a thud.

There are plenty of trigger warnings on this one, including self-harm and explicit sexual passages detailing liaisons between the teenage protagonist and his much older riding instructor. It’s visceral, nightmarish, and brutal, and it’s been so divisive that it’s worth reading almost solely to dive into the discussions surrounding it.

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All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

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Pretty Horses isn’t really a horse novel, as many pre-teens discover when they excitedly pull it off a parent’s bookshelf or dig it out of their local library, but horses certainly do feature as a vessel for unpacking the messiness of human nature.

If McCarthy does anything brilliantly, it’s scene-setting – as fans of The Road will know. This, the first novel in his Border trilogy, takes you to the southern US in the late 1940s and onward to the planes of Mexico, where the teenaged main characters head on horseback to try to build their lives around the movements of the wild horses.

It’s a coming-of-age novel in a very literal sense – and every lesson learn by the main characters comes around the hard way. It’s a stark, beautiful book by one of the very best living authors. Revisit it now, as an adult, and fall in love with the nebulous concept of freedom.