num_pages: 288
description: For fans of Helen Macdonalds H Is for Hawk this is the extraordinary debut memoir of a young woman who traveled to Mongolia to compete in the worlds longest toughest horse race and emerged as its youngest and first-ever female winner.At the age of nineteen Lara Prior-Palmer discovered a website devoted to the worlds longest toughest horse racean annual competition of endurance and skill that involves dozens of riders racing a series of twenty-five wild ponies across 1000 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 recreates the horse messenger system developed by Genghis Khan and 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.
language: English
title: Rough Magic: Riding the World's Loneliest Horse Race
publisher: Catapult