Willy Vlautin's The Horse: drenched in twangy music and heartbreak

The Bookshelf

Award-winning U.S. author Willy Vlautin's The Horse is his poignant new novel about the life of a lonely country musician in Nevada and his chance encounter with a half blind horse. Plus, bookseller David Gaunt reviews Ammar Kalia's A Person Is a Prayer, one family's story of migration from Kenya and India to the UK; and Wellington based critic and curator Claire Mabey looks at Laurence Fearnley's At The Grand Glacier Hotel, which follows a stormy family holiday set on New Zealand's South Island.

BOOKS

Willy Vlautin, The Horse, Faber

Ammar Kalia, A Person is a Prayer, Oldcastle Books

Laurence Fearnley, At the Grand Glacier Hotel, Penguin

GUESTS

David Gaunt, co-owner, Gleebooks, Sydney – independent bookshop [and one of the founding board members of the Indigenous Literacy Foundation]

Claire Mabey, NZ based books editor and critic; founder of Verb Wellington readers and writers festival, co-curator of the writers program at the Aotearoa Festival of the Arts – and she has just written her first novel for children, The Raven’s Eye Runaways

OTHER BOOKS MENTIONEDPatrick O'Brian, Aubrey–Maturin seriesAnita Brookner, Hotel du LacEvie Wyld, The EchoesKatherine Rundell, Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John DonneSinead Gleeson, Hagstone

CREDITS

• Presenter, Kate Evans + Cassie McCullagh
• Producer, Kate Evans + Sarah Corbett
• Sound engineer, Russell Stapleton
• Executive producer, Rhiannon Brown