Shakespeare And Company

Kathryn Scanlan’s Kick the Latch is the testament of Sonia—a horse trainer, a racetracker—who tells her story in taut vignettes, each of which contains more person, more world, more life, than a dozen pages of most contemporary novels. And what a world it is. Bruising, and brutal, where physical pain and severe injury are commonplace, a world shaped by violence and addiction, a tight-knit itinerant world of trainers, grooms, jockeys, owners, gamblers, racing secretaries, vets, and, of course—at the centre of it all—those enormous, enigmatic, empathetic beasts . . . horses.A work of fiction, based on interviews with a real-life Sonia, Kick the Latch thrums with a kind of hyper-authenticity, cracking open a closed society, placing a marginal life at its centre, and provoking a profound resonance between Sonia’s very specific struggles and joys and our own.Buy Kick the Latch: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/kick-the-latchKathryn Scanlan is the author of The Dominant Animal and lives in Los Angel