Book of the day: Foal’s Bread by Gillian Mears
The sound of horses’ hooves turns hollow on the farms west of Wirri. If a man can still ride, if he hasn’t totally lost the use of his legs, if he hasn’t died to the part of his heart that understands such things, then he should go for a gallop. At the very least he should stand at the road by the river imagining that he’s pushing a horse up the steep hill that leads to the house on the farm once known as One Tree.
In April the land will already seem yellow. Only further away, along the ridges, on slopes too steep to have been cleared, will the brush be either dark or bright, depending on whether or not a fire has torn along up there in summer. But it would be wrong to conclude that in the years before the second war and immediately afterwards, bushfires, not milk and cream, did best along One Tree Farm’s hills and thin ridges. This would be to forget the Flag Rriver flats, and the paddocks flanking Flaggy and Bitter Ground Creek; the land never ruined or sour for long because of the floods. Most importantly of all, that would be forgetting the kind of horses that mixed kind of country like One Tree can breed.
Cover blurb
Set in hardscrabble farming country and around the country show high-jumping circuit that prevailed in rural New South Wales prior to the Second World War, Foal’s Bread tells the story of two generations of the Nancarrow family and their fortunes as dictated by the vicissitudes of the land.
It is a love story of impossible beauty and sadness, a chronicle of dreams ‘turned inside out’, and miracles that never last, framed against a world both tender and unspeakably hard. Written in luminous prose and with an aching affinity for the landscape the book describes, Foal’s Bread is the work of a born writer at the height of her considerable powers. It is a stunning work of remarkable originality and power, one that confirms Gillian Mears’ reputation as one of our most exciting and acclaimed writers.
The full book jacket in all its glory:
