{"product_id":"horse-heaven","title":"Horse Heaven","description":"\"It's not true,\" says a character in Jane Smiley's funny, passionate, and brilliant new novel of horse racing, \"that anything can happen at the racetrack,\" but many astonishing and affecting things do -- and in Horse Heaven, we find them woven into a marvelous tapestry of joy and love, chicanery, folly, greed, and derring-do.\n\nHaunting, exquisite Rosalind Maybrick, wife of a billionaire owner, one day can't quite decide what it is she wants, and discovers too late that her whole life is transformed . . . Twenty-year-old Tiffany Morse, stuck in her job at Wal-Mart, prays, \"Please make something happen here . . . This time, I mean it,\" and something does . . . Farley, a good trainer in a bad slump; Buddy, a ruthless trainer who can't seem to lose even though he knows that his personal salvation depends upon it; Roberto, an apprentice jockey who has \"the hands\" but is growing too big for his dream career with every passing day; Leo the gambler and his earnest son, Jesse, who understands everything about his father's \"system\" except why it doesn't work; Elizabeth, the sixty-two-year-old theorist of sex and animal communication, and her best friend, Joy, the mare manager at the ranch at the center of the universe--all are woven together by the horses that pass among them: two colts and two fillies who begin with the promise of talent and breeding, and now might or might not achieve stardom.\n\nThere are the geldings -- Justa Bob, the plain brown horse who always wins by a nose, a lovable claimer who passes from owner to owner on a heart-wrenching journey down from the winner's circle; and the beautiful Mr. T., raced in France and rescued in Texas, who is discovered to have some unusual and amazing talents.\n\nAnd then there is the Jack Russell terrier, Eileen, a dog with real convictions -- and the will to implement them.\n\nThe strange, compelling, sparkling, and mysterious universe of horse racing that has fascinated generations of punters and robber barons, horse-lovers and wits, has never before been depicted with such verve and originality, such tenderness, such clarity, and, above all, such sheer exuberance.\u003cbr\u003eASIN: 037540600X\u003cbr\u003eVSKU: BVV.037540600X.A\u003cbr\u003eCondition: Acceptable\u003cbr\u003eAuthor\/Artist:Smiley, Jane\u003cbr\u003eBinding: Hardcover\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eNote:\u003c\/b\u003e Any images shown are stock photographs and product may differ from what is shown.  \u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Blue Vase Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43336003551293,"sku":"BVV.037540600X.A","price":7.34,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0589\/4225\/9261\/files\/037540600X-0.jpg?v=1783746177","url":"https:\/\/www.bluevasebooks.com\/products\/horse-heaven","provider":"Blue Vase Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}