A Horse at Night

Essayistic inquiries come together into a sustained meditation on writers and their works, on the spaces of reading and writing fiction, and how these spaces take shape inside a life.In A Horse at Night, Amina Cain contemplates how to be honest, open and free, as a person and a writer, even (and perhaps especially) during a time of great change. She moves elegantly through a personal canon of authors – including Marguerite Duras, Elena Ferrante and Annie Ernaux – and topics as timely and various as female friendships, neighbourhood coyotes, landscape painting and the politics of excess, to profound and joyous effect.An individual reckoning with the contemporary moment and a quietly brilliant contribution to the lineage of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own or William H. Gass's On Being Blue, A Horse at Night is a virtuosic argument for – and beautiful demonstration of – the essential unity of writing and life.'An exceptional book, a work of depth and elegance, with Amina Cain's bright intelligence threaded into its very seams. An exquisite creation.' Doireann Ni Ghriofa