Signed, Brand New, First U.K. Edition, First Printing, Hardcover/Dust Jacket, List: 17.99 pounds, 561 pages

Horse Heaven

by

Jane Smiley

(September 26, 1949 - present)

Smiley is the author of seventeen widely acclaimed novels, including A Thousand Acres, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Last Hundred Years Trilogy: Some Luck, Early Warning, and Golden Age. She is the author of five works of nonfiction and eight books for young adults. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she has also received the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature.

Horse Heaven was published in the U.K. in 2000.

First U.K. Edition, First Printing, hand SIGNED, in my presence, to full title page.

No inscription; full signature only.

From an event featuring Jane Smiley in New York City on May 5, 2010.

I took the photos of Jane Smiley in conversation with Kristina Baker Kline, with a reading by Katrina Lenk at Symphony Space in New York City on April 23, 2024.

BONUSES: The book store's May 2010 event flier (see photo 14) + a two-sided, color book mark from a previous Jane Smiley event at the New York Public Library (see photo 13) are included.

In addition, the dust jacket is protected by a clear, removable, mylar cover.

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I provide the highest quality author signed, first edition books.

100% authentic guaranteed - This is my COA "Certificate of Authenticity".  I won't sell any signed book that I'm not 100% sure is hand signed by the author. I attended this Jane Smiley  event in New York City on May 5, 2010.

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Book Description

"It's not true," says a character in Jane Smiley's funny, passionate, and brilliant new novel of horse racing, "that anything can happen at the racetrack," but many astonishing and affecting things do -- and in Horse Heaven, we find them woven into a marvelous tapestry of joy and love, chicanery, folly, greed, and derring-do. 

Haunting, exquisite Rosalind Maybrick, wife of a billionaire owner, one day can't quite decide what it is she wants, and discovers too late that her whole life is transformed . . . Twenty-year-old Tiffany Morse, stuck in her job at Wal-Mart, prays, "Please make something happen here . . . This time, I mean it," and something does . . . Farley, a good trainer in a bad slump; Buddy, a ruthless trainer who can't seem to lose even though he knows that his personal salvation depends upon it; Roberto, an apprentice jockey who has "the hands" but is growing too big for his dream career with every passing day; Leo the gambler and his earnest son, Jesse, who understands everything about his father's "system" except why it doesn't work; Elizabeth, the sixty-two-year-old theorist of sex and animal communication, and her best friend, Joy, the mare manager at the ranch at the center of the universe--all are woven together by the horses that pass among them: two colts and two fillies who begin with the promise of talent and breeding, and now might or might not achieve stardom. 

There are the geldings -- Justa Bob, the plain brown horse who always wins by a nose, a lovable claimer who passes from owner to owner on a heart-wrenching journey down from the winner's circle; and the beautiful Mr. T., raced in France and rescued in Texas, who is discovered to have some unusual and amazing talents. 

And then there is the Jack Russell terrier, Eileen, a dog with real convictions -- and the will to implement them.

The strange, compelling, sparkling, and mysterious universe of horse racing that has fascinated generations of punters and robber barons, horse-lovers and wits, has never before been depicted with such verve and originality, such tenderness, such clarity, and, above all, such sheer exuberance.


"A fast-paced, fetchingly detailed, wide-angled view of the world of horse breeding--and racing--and another lively illustration of Smiley's industrious literary work-ethic and gift for trasmuting the products of her obviously extensive research into compelling fiction." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"A narrative act of balancing so ambitious and so precisely executed that it becomes necessary to see Smiley as half acrobat, half writer; Horse Heaven is at least as athletic as the animals it describes. Horse Heaven is also a profound act of love... the horses move beyond sympathy to an even higher state of grace." --Pam Houston, Elle

"Smiley, it turns out, knows a prodigious amount about Thoroughbreds, and she is as good at describing the stages of their lives, their temperaments and personalities as she is in chronicling the ambitions, financial windfalls and ruins, love affairs, partings and reconciliations of her large cast of human characters.... Written with high spirits and enthusiasm, distinguished by Smiley's wry humor (as in Moo), the novel gallops into the home stretch without losing momentum." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A spirited new novel...Witty, energetic sentences are a hallmark of the novel...What's remarkable about Smiley's handling of horses as characters is that she manages to bring it off at all--and more, she does it brilliantly. Through an amazing imaginative leap, she enters into their heads and lets us see the world as they do...The racetrack provides an ideal, multidimensional backdrop for all the plots and subplots Smiley puts in motion...It's deeply satisfying to read a work of fiction so informed about its subject and so alive to every nuance and detail...She has immersed herself in the anecdotes and the lore of the track, and that allows her to create some nifty set pieces...A big, ambitious book....A smart, warmhearted, winning book " --The New York Times Book Review

"Smiley's horses almost steal the show from the humans in this symphonic celebration of the byzantine world of thoroughbred horse racing--although a mischievous Jack Russell terrier named Eileen rules supreme whenever the all-seeing narrative eye pans her way.... Smiley enriches her electrifying and at times melodramatic tale of two years on the thoroughbred racing circut with a wealth of intimate knowledge about horse breeding, training, and racing, not to mention sensuous description and supple human and equine psychology." --Booklist (starred review)

"Jane Smiley might consider a patent on virtuosity . . . Thackeray did it with the beau monde in Vanity Fair, Heller with war in Catch 22, and now Smiley with the world of thoroughbred racing . . . There are as many intriguing stories in this work as there are in a rich hunman life, and Smiley manages to bring them together in a deft directorial performance." --Bookpage