Wild Horses of the Summer Sun
A Memoir of Iceland
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A wondrous story of adventure and friendship featuring a group of women who ride Icelandic horses.
"Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us." - Virgina Woolf
Each June, Tory Bilski meets up with fellow women travelers in Reykjavik where they head to northern Iceland, near the Greenland Sea. They escape their ordinary lives to live an extraordinary one at a horse farm perched at the edge of the world. If only for a short while.
When they first came to Thingeyar, these women were strangers to one another. The only thing they had in common was their passion for Icelandic horses. However, over the years, their relationships with each other deepens, growing older together and keeping each other young.
Combining the self-discovery of Eat, Pray, Love, the sense of place of Under the Tuscan Sun, and the danger of Wild, Wild Horses of the Summer Sun revels in Tory's quest for the "wild" inside her.
These women leave behind the usual troubles at home: illnesses, aging parents, troubled teenagers, financial worries and embrace their desire for adventure. Buoyed by their friendships with each other and their growing attachments and bonds with the otherworldly horses they ride, the warmth of Thingeyrar's midnight sun carries these women through the rest of the year's trials and travails.
Filled with adventure and fresh humor, as well as an incredible portrait of Iceland and its remarkable equines, Wild Horses of the Summer Sun will enthrall and delight not just horse lovers, but those of us who yearn for a little more wild in everyday life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Debut author Bilski weaves a narrative of horses and friendship in windswept Iceland in this transportive memoir. Bilski, a married mother of two working as a Yale administrator, on a whim joins a trip to a horse farm in northern Iceland in 2004. At first, she and the other eight women at the farm are strangers, but they soon bond over their love of Icelandic horses and, over each of the following 11 years, the group returns to the farm. In an episodic, straightforward narrative, Bilski shares moments of life on the farm, including horse husbandry ("this is an equine love story and we all go gushy") and being dive-bombed by Arctic terns intent on keeping her away from their nests. Each year in June, the women left behind worries about finances, health scares, children, and parents in declining health for a month of riding along weather-beaten trails in Iceland's near-constant daylight, where "I am peacefully alone and temporarily lost." In 2015, Helga, the farm's owner, announces that she has sold the farm, but Bilski and three of the women travel back for one last nostalgic look at the farm and stay at another horse ranch but it's not the same, and it's unclear whether they'll return to Iceland. Those with adventurous spirits and healthy amounts of wanderlust will devour this charming memoir.
