Top Fiction Horse Books
Need a present for someone horsey? A selection of well-written horse books for well-read people.
Every time I’m in a used-book store, I look for Jilly Cooper. I’m always lending her books out, and never getting them back - friends read them, and then they have to pass them along to another friend, and so it goes. It’s OK - I’m more than happy to share my love of reading!
Riders is Cooper’s most popular book, but I love Polo best, which chronicles wild Perdita’s quest to become a high-goal polo player. Perdita is beautiful, ambitious, and knows exactly what she wants and how to get it. Sometimes when I’m feeling insecure, I ask myself “what would Perdita do?” She’s my kind of heroine.
The classic and a must-read for any show jumper. Jilly Cooper is funny, smart, and a very good writer. Nobody writes a sex scene better - it’s hot, and not cringey at all. Her works are relegated to the romance section of the book store, a genre not exactly celebrated for stellar writing, but I think she deserves a place in the canon of adult fiction. And the cover is SO iconic.
3) In Colt Blood by Jody Jaffe.
Nobody writes about the hunter world better than Jody Jaffe. Her mystery books are genuinely thrilling, and she shares funny and pointed observations about the monied world of A-circuit hunter/jumper competition in the southern United States.
4) Chestnut Mare, Beware by Jody Jaffe.
I mean, the title alone is pure gold. Another Nattie Gold mystery and while I have read and reread In Colt Blood the most often, this one is a close second.
Jody Jaffe has also recently published her first edition of Gallop, an equine literary magazine that I highly recommend checking out.
5) The Monday Horses by Jean Slaughter Doty.
This one is pretty hard to find, but worth tracking down. The main character, Cassie, becomes a catch rider for very fancy ponies. Jean Slaughter Doty writes excellently about the pony world, and the misuse of performance enhancing drugs. Published in 1978, the issues raised still feel relevant today.
6) Phantom: Son of the Gray Ghost by C.W. Anderson.
Another oldie but goodie. This is the most beautifully illustrated story about a courageous girl who finds a magnificent horse who knows only speed and speed alone. She rides him everywhere at a breakneck gallop, with thrilling results.
7) The God of Animals by Aryn Kyle
Go buy this book. It’s an aching story about growing up on a horse farm with the responsibilities of riding and showing horses, and not feeling fully up to the task. Aryn Kyle describes these professional kids in a way that vividly brought to mind so many of the tough horsey girls I grew up riding with…
“girls like Nona who had been showing their whole lives, girls with set jaws and tight eyes and arms like knotted ropes. They slouched on their horses when they weren’t in the ring and snuck cigarettes behind the announcer’s booth during breaks. These were girls who had been thrown and stomped and dragged, girls who’d had horses fall beneath them or flip on top of them. By the time they were thirteen, they all had a story: a collarbone broken when a young horse bucked, a knee blown when a mare shied sideways into a fence post, a pelvis shattered when a horse had lain down and rolled, pinning the rider beneath.”
8) Black Beauty by Anna Sewell.
You’ve probably seen the Disney movie, and cried when Ginger died. We all did. But the novel contains multitudes. The first chapter, describing fox hunting from a horse’s perceptive? So good. And did you know that bearing reins, described so well in Black Beauty as being cruel to horses, were banned in Victorian England following the publication of this book in 1877? Here’s to the power of literature.