Keeneland: A Novel - Tapa blanda

Nicholas Delbanco A book that fairly races from starter's gate to finish line, composed with edgy knowingness and an unblinking eye. Bet on Alyson Hagy to show, place, and win.

Madison Smartt Bell Alyson Hagy captures the speed, fervor, and desperate urgency of the racehorse world as very few writers have done before. Keeneland is a novel with a large, powerful, passionate heart.

Annie Proulx Hagy's character Kerry is one of the most psychologically complex and realistic women in recent American literature. Increasingly hardened by experience, locked into a destructive pattern of wrong choices, and ex-pecting little from others or herself, she gets out of the tough corners with an obdurate persistence that translates as survival, not only in the rough racetrack milieu but in contemporary American life and mores. Hagy is a writer on her way.

Bob Shacochis Alyson Hagy's voice is solid hickory, and Keeneland is a world weaned on cards and Thoroughbreds, the rhumba of power and money, the bourbon-soaked lullaby of truths. An honest writer has given us an honest book that gallops headlong toward the shadowy horizon. Praise be.

From award-winning writer Alyson Hagy comes a novel set at Kentucky's Keeneland racetrack, where the horses run for glory and people stake love and money -- all to win at the sport of kings. Hagy, a compelling storyteller who has the "same way with language as her characters have with animals" "(San Jose Mercury News), " introduces Kerry Connelly, a skilled exercise rider who hasn't yet learned that liking a horse doesn't make it faster but loving one means genuine risk. Kerry -- who can hardly remember a day she hasn't put sweat in the saddle -- is more or less healthy, more or less single, and technically broke. She's come back to home turf, the sweet Kentucky bluegrass of Keeneland, one step ahead of her estranged husband, Eric. A trainer fueled by drugs and money dreams, he's got control of Kerry's champion mare, Sunsquall, and has New York loan sharks after them all. "Keeneland" may not be much of a haven, as Kerry's shadowy past has not been forgotten. Some people on the backside of the track are too proud to take her back without a fight -- Alice Piersall, the massive, hell-for-leather trainer of second-rate horses; Reno, a one-time child preacher who now saves his brimstone sermons for the Thoroughbreds; and Billy, a former lover known for his honesty in a roulette wheel business. Others are determined to make her fall -- bottle-blond Louisa Fett, a rider who has hated Kerry since they trained together as teens; Delvecchio, a showboat trainer who treats his barn girls like stock. Gossip, gambling, lust, and outright robbery erode Kerry's dwindling fortunes. When Eric returns to make his play, risking Sunsquall to clear his debts, Kerry must find out if her final cards -- her body and soul -- are enough to save her in this world where little lasts for long except hope. Keeneland, as Hagy tells it, in a haunting voice "as unique and natural as folk art" "(The Orlando Sentinel), " energizes -- and humanizes -- the carnival chaos of racetrack life.