Step into a farrier's boots and experience funny, thrilling, sad and unusual stories featuring a host of lively characters, both equine and human. There's always something interesting happening in the life of a farrier.

With an elegant sweetness and a pitch-perfect sense of western life reminiscent of Annie Dillard, Glosss breakout novel is a remarkable story about the connections between people and animals and how they touch one another in the most unexpected and profound ways.

Are horses really God's way of apologizing for men? When Susan was a girl of 10, she thought it would be perfect if only she could marry a horse. Two decades later she sometimes feared she might have to marry a horse as there seemed to be no suitable human alternative! Trot through Horses Adored and Men Endured and you'll sneak a neighbor's Palomino to a horse show, buy a green gelding as a first horse against all conventional advice, and trek across the Irish countryside on a sassy chestnut. Tag along on several cringe-worthy dates starting with food poisoning at prom to the surprise pie fight. Be there when Susan finally falls head over heels with someone tall, dark and handsome (it's a bay Thoroughbred gelding!). If you love heartwarming animal stories and laugh-out-loud tales of bad dates, pick up the memoir Horses Adored and Men Endured right now and gallop away on a horse-loving, Mr. Right-hunting adventure!

When two boys from a remote island off the western Irish coast venture to the forbidden Island of Horses, they find a mysterious tame black colt and unexpected danger.

Did you ever have a notion of this kind—there is an orange, or say an apple, lying on a table before you. You put out your hand to take it. Perhaps you eat it, make it a part of your physical life. Have you touched? Have you eaten? That’s what I wonder about. The whole subject is only important to me because I want the apple. What subtle flavors are concealed in it—how does it taste, smell, feel? Heavens, man, the way the apple feels in the hand is something—isn’t it? For a long time I thought only of eating the apple. Then later its fragrance became something of importance too. The fragrance stole out through my room, through a window and into the streets. It made itself a part of all the smells of the streets. The devil!—in Chicago or Pittsburgh, Youngstown or Cleveland it would have had a rough time. That doesn’t matter. The point is that after the form of the apple began to take my eye I often found myself unable to touch at all. My hands went toward the object of my desire and then came back. There I sat, in the room with the apple before me, and hours passed. I had pushed myself off into a world where nothing has any existence. Had I done that, or had I merely stepped, for the moment, out of the world of darkness into the light? It may be that my eyes are blind and that I cannot see. It may be I am deaf. My hands are nervous and tremble. How much do they tremble? Now, alas, I am absorbed in looking at my own hands. With these nervous and uncertain hands may I really feel for the form of things concealed in the darkness?...FROM THE BOOKS.

Winner of a 2020 Border Regional Library Association Southwest Book Award “Truly transcendent.” —Jessica Lustig, New York Times Book Review This riveting memoir follows professional horse trainer Ginger Gaffney’s year-long odyssey to train a herd of neglected horses at an alternative prison ranch in New Mexico. Working with her is a small team of ranch “residents,” men and women who are each uniquely broken by addiction and incarceration. Gaffney forms a bond with them as profound as the kinship and trust the residents discover among the troubled horses. Through these unforgettable characters—both animal and human—Half Broke tells a new kind of recovery story and speaks to the life-affirming joy of finding a sense of belonging.

Originally published: Great Britain: Piccadilly Press, 2016.