Foal's Bread by Gillian Mears

JUDGES' COMMENTS

Foal’s Bread is the saga of a rural family and their horses on the north coast of NSW. In the hard years before the Second World War, Noah Childs escapes from her complicated family life and gruelling farm work through her talent for horse-jumping and love for another champion high-jumper, Roley Nancarrow. As a young couple they win honours on the high-jumping circuit, breed horses and raise their children. But tragedy strikes too often, beginning with Roley’s crippling illness, and leaves their daughter, Lainey, to pursue her parents’ dreams.

Gillian Mears writes with deep understanding of people and horses in a carefully researched story that wears its history lightly. Her fluent prose is lyrical but restrained, emotional but unsparing, blending country vernacular with electrifying descriptions of human passion and equine power. Exhilaration, sex, violence, death, jealousy, tenderness and despair all crackle on the page.