
The Horse
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Willy Vlautin
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By:
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Willy Vlautin
About this listen
“Willy Vlautin writes about people overlooked by society and overlooked by literature. In The Horse, he tells the story of a tenderhearted man who has a steady talent and a crushing addiction. It is both a work of extraordinary compassion and a really great novel."—Ann Patchett, New York Times bestselling author of Tom Lake
“A moving tale of suffering and redemption, The Horse portrays the immense gravity of what it takes to be human in tough times, and the elusive grace that might just be grasped from music, animals, and memory.”—Geraldine Brooks, New York Times bestselling author of Horse
Award-winning author Willy Vlautin explores loneliness, art, regret, and hard-won empathy in this poignant novel—his most personal to date—that captures the life of a journeyman musician unable to escape the tragedies of his past.
Al Ward lives on an isolated mining claim in the high desert of central Nevada fifty miles from the nearest town. A grizzled man in his sixties, he survives on canned soup, instant coffee, and memories of his ex-wife, friends and family he’s lost, and his life as a touring musician. Hampered by insomnia, bouts of anxiety, and a chronic lethargy that keeps him from moving back to town, Al finds himself teetering on the edge of madness and running out of reasons to go on—until a horse arrives on his doorstep: nameless, blind, and utterly helpless.
Al hopes the horse will vanish as mysteriously as he appeared. Yet the animal remains, leaving him in a conundrum. Is the animal real, or a phantom conjured from imagination? As Al contemplates the horse’s existence—and what, if anything, he can do—his thoughts are interspersed with memories, from the moment his mother’s part-time boyfriend gifts him a 1959 butterscotch blonde Telecaster, to the day his travels begin. He joins various bands—all who perform his songs once they discover his talent–playing casinos, truck stops, clubs, and bars. He falls in love, and finds pockets of companionship and minor success along the way. Never close to stardom or financial success, he continues as a journeyman for decades until alcoholism and a heartbreaking tragedy lead him to the solitude of the barren Nevada desert.
A poignant meditation on addiction, heartbreak, and the reality of life on the road in smalltime bands, The Horse is a beautiful, haunting tale from an author working at the height of his powers.
©2024 Willy Vlautin (P)2024 HarperCollins PublishersListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
It's 1990 in London and Tom Hargreaves has it all: a burgeoning career as a reporter, fierce ambition and a brisk disregard for the "peasants"—ordinary people, his readers, easy tabloid fodder. His star seems set to rise when he stumbles across a sensational scoop: a dead child on a London estate, grieving parents beloved across the neighborhood, and the finger of suspicion pointing at one reclusive family of Irish immigrants and “bad apples”: the Greens. At their heart sits Carmel: beautiful, otherworldly, broken, and once destined for a future beyond her circumstances.
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Grim and luminous all at once.
- By M. Locher on 02-08-25
By: Megan Nolan
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The Examiner
- A Novel
- By: Janice Hallett
- Narrated by: Anushka Chakravarti, Brendan Dempsey, Jonathan Andrew Hume, and others
- Length: 10 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Gela Nathaniel, head of Royal Hastings University’s new Multimedia Art course, must find six students from all walks of life across the United Kingdom for her new master’s program before the university cuts her funding. The students are nothing but trouble from day one. When the examiner, the man hired to grade students’ final workssifts through the students’ final essays, texts, and message boards, he becomes convinced that someone is in danger…or already dead.
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Disjointed and anticlimactic
- By Chykcha on 10-15-24
By: Janice Hallett
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The Horse
- A Galloping History of Humanity
- By: Timothy C. Winegard
- Narrated by: Sean Patrick Hopkins
- Length: 19 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Timothy C. Winegard’s The Horse is an epic history unlike any other. Its story begins more than 5,500 years ago on the windswept grasslands of the Eurasian Steppe; when one human tamed one horse, an unbreakable bond was forged and the future of humanity was instantly rewritten, placing the reins of destiny firmly in human hands. Since that pivotal day, the horse has carried the history of civilizations on its powerful back.
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Virtue signaling on 4 legs
- By K N on 08-25-24
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Friends with Secrets
- A Novel
- By: Christine Gunderson
- Narrated by: Sarah Naughton, Andi Arndt
- Length: 12 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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What you see isn’t always what you get. Take Ainsley. The gorgeous mother of two lives a picture-perfect life with her husband, Ben—aspiring politician and heir to a candy fortune—in suburban Washington, DC. But in reality, Ainsley has no idea what she’s doing and is terrified someone will figure out who she really is and where she came from.
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Characters
- By Amy Arnold on 10-17-24
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We Will Be Jaguars
- A Memoir of My People
- By: Mitch Anderson, Nemonte Nenquimo
- Narrated by: Christine Ann-Roche
- Length: 13 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Born into the Waorani tribe of Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest, Nemonte Nenquimo had a singular upbringing. She was taught about plant medicines, foraging, oral storytelling, and shamanism by her elders. She played barefoot in the forest until she was a teenager and left to study with an evangelical missionary group in the city. But after Nemonte’s ancestors began appearing in her dreams, pleading with her to return and embrace her own culture, she listened. Nemonte returned to the forest and traditional ways of life and became one of the most forceful voices in climate change activism.
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A story that needed telling
- By just asking for some common sense on 01-17-25
By: Mitch Anderson, and others
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The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife
- A Novel
- By: Anna Johnston
- Narrated by: Tim Carroll
- Length: 10 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Frederick Fife was born with an extra helping of kindness in his heart. If he borrowed your car, he’d return it washed with a full tank of gas. The problem is there’s nobody left in Fred’s life to borrow from. At eighty-two, he’s desperately lonely, broke, and on the brink of homelessness. But Fred’s luck changes when, in a bizarre case of mistaken identity, he takes the place of grumpy Bernard Greer at the local nursing home. Now he has warm meals in his belly and a roof over his head—as long as his poker face is in better shape than his prostate and that his look-alike never turns up.
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Somewhat engaging but predictable
- By RSNYC on 10-15-24
By: Anna Johnston
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All the Pretty Horses
- The Border Trilogy, Book One
- By: Cormac McCarthy
- Narrated by: Frank Muller
- Length: 10 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Sixteen-year-old John Grady Cole's grandfather has just died, his parents have permanently separated, and the family ranch, upon which he had placed so many boyish hopes, has been sold. Rootless and increasingly restive, Cole leaves Texas, accompanied by his friend Lacey Rawlins, and begins a journey across the vaquero frontier into the badlands of northern Mexico.
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Beautiful writing
- By LMS on 05-21-15
By: Cormac McCarthy
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Challenger
- A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space
- By: Adam Higginbotham
- Narrated by: Jacques Roy
- Length: 17 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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From the New York Times bestselling author of Midnight in Chernobyl comes the definitive, dramatic, minute-by-minute story of the Challenger disaster, based on fascinating in-depth reporting and new archival research—a riveting history that flows like a thriller.
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Best book about Challenger so far
- By Bruce Baumbush on 06-05-24
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Washington's End
- The Final Years and Forgotten Struggle
- By: Jonathan Horn
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 8 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Washington’s End begins where most biographies of George Washington leave off, with the first president exiting office after eight years and entering what would become the most bewildering stage of his life. Embittered by partisan criticism and eager to return to his farm, Washington assumed a role for which there was no precedent at a time when the kings across the ocean yielded their crowns only upon losing their heads. In a different sense, Washington would lose his head, too.
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INTRIGUING SNAPSHOT
- By JPALJ on 02-23-20
By: Jonathan Horn
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The Road to the Salt Sea
- A Novel
- By: Samuel Kolawole
- Narrated by: Atta Otigba
- Length: 9 hrs
- Unabridged
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Able God works for low pay at a four-star hotel where he must flash his “toothpaste-white smile” for wealthy guests. When not tending to the hotel’s overprivileged clientele, he muses over self-help books and draws life lessons from the game of chess.
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A Fast-Paced, Heart-Shredding, Unflinching Migrant Story
- By Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond on 07-25-24
By: Samuel Kolawole
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Three Days in June
- A Novel
- By: Anne Tyler
- Narrated by: J. Smith-Cameron
- Length: 4 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Gail Baines is having a bad day. To start, she loses her job—or quits, depending on whom you ask. Tomorrow her daughter, Debbie, is getting married, and she hasn’t even been invited to the spa day organized by the mother of the groom. Then, Gail’s ex-husband, Max, arrives unannounced on her doorstep, carrying a cat, without a place to stay, and without even a suit. But the true crisis lands when Debbie shares with her parents a secret she has just learned about her husband to be. It will not only throw the wedding into question but also stir up Gail and Max’s past.
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Simple, Enjoyable, performed 5 stars
- By PM on 02-14-25
By: Anne Tyler
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The Stolen Child
- A Novel
- By: Ann Hood
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 10 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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For decades, Nick Burns has been haunted by a decision he made as a young soldier in World War I, when a French artist he’d befriended thrust both her paintings and her baby into his hands—and disappeared. In 1974, with only months left to live, Nick enlists Jenny, a college dropout desperate for adventure, to help him unravel the mystery. The journey leads them from Paris galleries and provincial towns to a surprising place: the Museum of Tears, the life’s work of a lonely Italian craftsman.
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What if you made a different decision at some point in your life
- By maryanne k on 05-17-24
By: Ann Hood
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The Safekeep
- By: Yael van der Wouden
- Narrated by: Stina Nielsen, Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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An exhilarating, twisted tale of desire, suspicion, and obsession between two women staying in the same house in the Dutch countryside during the summer of 1961—a powerful exploration of the legacy of WWII and the darker parts of our collective past.
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This One Should Win
- By K. Bella Bestia on 10-13-24
Lovely Harsh Sweet
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The sobering details of the few up’s and the many‘down’s in Al’s life.
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Deeply moving piece of Americana
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Al’s Song titles
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Couldn't go on...
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Willy Vlautin is a treasure
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The tale was haunting, depressing, yet ever hopeful
I was deeply moved by the story and how well it was spoken
Poetic
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After a while, I kinda started to like it.
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Depressing, moving and classic W. Planting! Great story with very real characters.
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But the protagonist is a good man, just unlucky in life. And the horse himself is also a parallel of the main character, sort of a spirit animal.
I won’t ruin the end, but the journey is wonderfully told. Don’t know a lot of forlorn country singers myself, but I do know a lot of people who’ve tried their whole lives to get it right and never really get there. Empathy for woebegone types is a must for this story and the treasure can be found.
Also, it’s just one of the best books I’ve ever read.
Tugs at the heartstrings
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