Our Horses in Egypt - Hardcover

Belben, Rosalind

3.5

38 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 070117594X ISBN 13: 9780701175948

Publisher: Chatto & Windus, 2007

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Philomena, fat and lazy when she is requisitioned from an English field at the start of the First World War, sails for Egypt with the territorial regiment, the Dorset Yeomanry. She serves faithfully, charging the dervishes in the Western Desert and enduring the privations of Allenby’s great campaign in Palestine. She recovers from wounds to swelter through a summer in the Jordan Valley. She takes part in the triumphant advance on Damascus – only to be sold off in Cairo among the 22,000 horses left behind by the War Office after the Armistice.

By 1921, the forceful Griselda Romney, a war widow – in the author's Hound Music she was a child – has discovered that her old hunter, Philomena, could be still alive. With her six-year-old daughter, and of course Nanny, Mrs Romney sets out to Egypt, to find Philomena and to rescue her...

Our Horses in Egypt depicts the work of a troop-horse in the Army – and of exotic Cairo, in political unrest – as meticulously and exuberantly as Hound Music recreated the milieu of Edwardian fox-hunting.

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About the Author:

Rosalind Belben lives in Dorset and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Among her admired novels are Hound Music, Choosing Spectacles, Is Beauty Good and Dreaming of Dead People.

Review:

"A most unusual, fascinating novel...gripping transcontinental adventure."
—Herald

"A remarkable work of literature: an intensely noticing novel, told in a style of dashing idiosyncrasy that adapts equally well to comic verve and unbearable sadness. If literary prizes were awarded (as they still, occasionally, are), on pure excellence of writing, Our Horses in Egypt would be sure to make Rosalind Belben a late-blooming household name."
—Jane Shilling, Sunday Telegraph

"Belben does not shy away from difficult themes...In this powerful novel, Belben celebrates the gift of not forgetting with the confidence and style of a writer who deserves to be a great deal better known."
—Melissa Katsoulis, Tablet

"Brilliantly brutal passages by Belben."
—Ed Vanstone, Big Issue Cymru

"Here is a First World War story and a love story with a difference... Rosalind Belben is as unsentimental as she is skilful. Griselda's quest is perfectly paced, and the author's default tone is restraint mixed with irony. As a result she has conjured up a novel of unexpected potency."
—Edwin Reardon, The First Post

"Magnificent... funny and sad, by turns elegant and terse, romantic and brisk – evocative and entirely beguiling, a wonderful novel."
—Matthew Dennison, Daily Telegraph

Splicing tales of Griselda's mission with Philomena's wartime trials, Belben's narrative ambles along at a pace suited to the war-battered world in which it unfolds. From this sentimental premise, she carves an epic tale devoid of syrup that cuts to the heart of our relationship with other cultures and other creatures."
—Hepzibah Anderson, Bloomberg.com

"The novel offers a heart-rending account of the horses’ experience in the Great War... Our Horses in Egypt, a radical experiment in narrative, has a sympathetic splendour, leading the blinkered humanist imagination into the realm of creaturely experience."
—Stevie Davies, Independent

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