Black Beauty
1877 · 186 pages
A horse narrates his own life, passed down from a gentleman's stable to the London cab ranks. Sewell wrote to make drivers feel the head-wrenching bearing rein, and England stopped using it.
★ 5.3
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
West with the Night
1942 · 293 pages
Raised barefoot in Kenya, Markham hunted with Nandi boys, trained racehorses, and scouted elephants from the air before flying the Atlantic alone. Hemingway said she made him ashamed as a writer.
★ 5.6
All the Pretty Horses
1992 · 302 pages
Sixteen years old and landless, John Grady Cole rides into Mexico in 1949 and finds work breaking horses on a great hacienda. McCarthy writes horses and hard country better than any American novelist.
★ 6.8