Rough Magic by Lara Prior-Palmer

Rough Magic by Lara Prior-Palmer

Think the next Educated or Wild. Palmer's memoir of beating the odds to become a horse champion is an inspiring saga of perseverance--and a classic underdog tale. --Entertainment Weekly

At the age of nineteen, Lara Prior-Palmer discovered a website devoted to the world's longest, toughest horse race―an annual competition of endurance and skill that involves dozens of riders racing a series of twenty-five wild ponies across 1,000 kilometers of Mongolian grassland. On a whim, she decided to enter the race. As she boarded a plane to East Asia, she was utterly unprepared for what awaited her.

Riders often spend years preparing to compete in the Mongol Derby, a course that re-creates the horse messenger system developed by Genghis Khan. Many fail to finish. Prior-Palmer had no formal training. She was driven by her own restlessness, stubbornness, and a lifelong love of horses. She raced for ten days through extreme heat and terrifying storms, catching a few hours of sleep where she could at the homes of nomadic families. Battling bouts of illness and dehydration, exhaustion and bruising falls, she decided she had nothing to lose. Each dawn she rode out again on a fresh horse, scrambling up mountains, swimming through rivers, crossing woodlands and wetlands, arid dunes and open steppe, as American television crews chased her in their jeeps.

Told with terrific suspense and style, in a voice full of poetry and soul, Rough Magic captures the extraordinary story of one young woman who forged ahead, against all odds, to become the first female winner of this breathtaking race.

Taking off on a horse into the Mongolian Steppe sounds like the bracing inverse to an overpopulated, busy urban life, but having the skills and grit to pull it off is another thing entirely. . . . Lara Prior-Palmer attempted the Mongol Derby not really knowing what she was getting into; she ended it knowing much more about herself, and a race champion besides. ―Estelle Tang, Elle

Lara Prior-Palmer was born in the year 1994 in London. At Stanford University, she studied conceptual history and Persian. In 2013, she raced in Mongolia's 1,000-kilometer Mongol Derby, dubbed the world's roughest and longest horse race, and became the first woman to win the race and the youngest person to ever complete. Her debut novel is Rough Magic.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781948226196
ISBN 10	1948226197
Title	Rough Magic
Author	Lara Prior-Palmer
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Catapult
Year published	2019-05-07
Number of pages	288
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.