“Horse-heaven, and a
must-read for any woman
If Wishes Were
Horses:
A Memoir of Equine Obsession
"Susanna
Forrest grew up in the 1980s near Norwich, and like many a girl, she yearned
for a pony. She was never to get one, but this didn't stop her becoming
obsessed with all things equine. If
Wishes Were Ponies is the story of that all-consuming interest, and of the
author's nerve-wracked attempts later in life to ride once again.
However,
as Susanna Forrest's journey unfolds, it leads her to horse-obsessed
princesses, recovering crack addicts, courtesans, warriors, pink-obsessed
schoolgirls, national heroines and runaways across the ages. From girl-riders
of the Bronze Age, to lavishly adorned equestrian Victorians and
twenty-first-century children on horseback in Brixton, she explores the
development of this Pony Cult from its earliest times to the present day.
Alternating between Berlin, London and Norfolk, urban, suburban and rural,
Susanna Forrest visits gymkhanas and pony shows, horse refuges and inner-city
riding schools, acquainting herself with fabulous figures such as Alice Hayes,
a medical missionary turned horsebreaker who was the first woman to ride a wild
zebra, and a fragile and fierce old lady called Hope, who today carries a
knitting bag full of painkillers for her old riding injuries. In doing so, she
takes to the saddle once more and rediscovers her own riding legs in this
frank, eclectic and captivating memoir of an ever-changing equine world."
Biography
I'm the author of If
Wishes Were Horses: A Memoir of
Equine Obsession, published by Atlantic Books in 2012. I began researching
the book late in 2004 after I moved to Berlin. I'm currently working on a
second book for Atlantic called The Age
of the Horse and blogging all sorts of random and fascinating things about
horses, humans and history.
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1 comment:
Looks good, thanks for sharing.
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