The God Of Animals - Aryn Kyle

The God of Animals is the story of the coming of age of 13-year-old narrator Alice Winston: lonely, unloved and eager to escape her dysfunctional family and small-town life. Her father runs a struggling horse barn in a small desert town in the American South-West; her mother has been mysteriously ill for years and never leaves her bedroom. And Nona, her beloved older sister, has run away with a cowboy, leaving Alice to fend for herself in an indifferent world, where horses are loved more than people, but people hurt horses just as much as they hurt each other. When Alice goes looking for love and attention outside the world she knows, the consequences are serious for her and all of her family.

This is an extraordinary, beautifully written debut, filled with vivid descriptions of horses and the realities of keeping them, but at its heart it's a story of love, loss and family ties, with a wonderful narrator, who is candid, wise, funny, far too knowing for her own good and yet of course not nearly knowing enough...