Hell's bells! Daring racing epic sprawls into literary canon

The Sport of Kings by C.E. Morgan
£16.99 (hardback), published by Fourth Estate – 4thestate.co.uk

Described as the “most daring novel of the year” in a five-star review in the Telegraph, The Sport of Kings has drawn lavish praise from a range of distinguished critics on both sides of the Atlantic as an “audacious fiction that breathes new life into the American canon” (Telegraph again). Heady stuff indeed, and this is heavy stuff indeed, a spiralling tale of wealth and poverty, racism and rage, set across 560 unflinching, densely written narrow-type pages and several generations of the Forge family, a Kentucky-based dynasty dating back to the state's first settlers.

As its title suggests, C.E. Morgan's sprawling book ostensibly revolves around horseracing, specifically a star filly named Hellsmouth who runs for the Forges and in whom three separate vested interests become intertwined. Henry Forge is an unyielding, damaged patriarch obsessed with selective breeding; his untamable daughter Henrietta questions the central tenets of a skewed belief system. “The anthropologists beat the eugenicists a long time ago,” suggests Henrietta. “Supposedly immutable traits are malleable under the forces of environment.” Beat that, Jilly Cooper!