Farewell to the Horse
  • Published: 26 February 2018
  • ISBN: 9780141983172
  • Imprint: Penguin Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 480
  • RRP: $28.00

Farewell to the Horse

The Final Century of Our Relationship

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Paperback
26 Feb 2018
EBook
17 Jul 2017
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A magical, wise and beguiling history of all the ways in which our world has been made by the horse.

The relationship between horses and humans is an ancient, profound and complex one. For millennia horses provided the strength and speed that humans lacked. How we travelled, farmed and fought was dictated by the needs of this extraordinary animal. They were sculpted, painted, cherished, admired; they were thrashed, abused and exposed to terrible danger. And then, suddenly, in the 20th century the links were broken and the millions of horses that shared our existence almost vanished. Farewell to the Horse is an engaging, brilliantly written and moving discussion of the endlessly various creature who has so often shared and shaped our fate.
  • Published: 26 February 2018
  • ISBN: 9780141983172
  • Imprint: Penguin Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 480
  • RRP: $28.00
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Praise for Farewell to the Horse

A brilliant, entertaining tour-de-force

Die Zeit

Amazing insights sweep through the book - an entrancing history packed with stories

Neue Zürcher Zeitung

Great cultural history

Der Tagesspiegel

A fabulous book

Uli Hufen

Ulrich Raulff is a wonderful storyteller

Südwestrundfunk

An exciting and entertaining ride through various landscapes

Harry Nutt

A beautiful and thoughtful exploration of the role of the horse in creating our world... lyrical and creative...I very much enjoyed it. Some of the scenes in it will stay with me for a long time to come

James Rebanks

Intellectual and passionate ... Raulff's material is gloriously diverse ... [a] refined and ambitious book

The Sunday Times

Covers ground as rapidly and thrillingly as a Cossack horseman. It lays bare a dizzying network of connections and repeatedly offers unfamiliar approached to old themes

Literary Review

This is not the Pony Club Manual or a trot through the more familiar sights of equestrian art history; it's Kafka, Aby Warburg, Tolstoy, psychoanalytic theory, Nietzsche and bleak monochrome photos in the style of Sebald. This epic enterprise is relieved by Raulff's spare, vivid style and deep learning

Susannah Forrest, Literary Review

Sex, violence and 6,000 years of horse power... an elegy to the way horses have galloped through our culture'

Melanie Reid, The Times

It becomes evident within three paragraphs that you have never read a book like it ... his writerly pace is exhilarating

Kate Kellaway, Observer

Strange and fascinating . . . A sweeping cultural history, more kaleidoscopic than totale, as bibliographical as it is historical . . . Farewell to the Horse is a whirlwind that seems capable of drawing into its vortex almost anyone who ever thought of a horse.

Verlyn Klinkenborg, New York Review of Books

A remarkably nimble, creative thinker . . . Raulff's text is somehow dreamy but not sentimental . . . A brilliant examination of our complicated and violently unilateral relationship with Equus caballus . . . Though this book is about horses, it is just as much about thinking as a devotional act.

C. E. Morgan, New York Times Book Review