Mare by Emily Haworth-Booth — a woman's love for a horse

Mare, Emily Haworth‑Booth’s first novel for adults, follows a woman confronting three life‑altering crises: an early menopause that ends any chance of having a child, a sudden loss of ideas after success as a children’s book writer, and an intense attachment to a horse that isn’t even hers.

She pays to ride, feed, groom and muck out the animal a few times a week, and perversely the horse becomes the centre of her life: her beloved. Much of the book is about childlessness. It opens with reflections on motherhood — "Write a list of all the things you love doing and then cross them out, one by one" — and the narrator, who decided against having a baby because she feared her child’s future in an ailing world, feels unmoored when she finally knows she won’t have children.

She has trouble connecting with friends who are mothers, avoids her own mother and befriends the neighbour’s children only to watch them go home; in winter they stop visiting and the house grows silent.

mare, emily haworth-booth, novel, childlessness, early menopause, motherhood, horse, writer's block, children's books, animal attachment