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Foal's Bread Paperback – 1 September 2012

by Gillian Mears (Author)
4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 223 ratings
Edition: 1st
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The long-awaited new novel from the award-winning author of The Grass Sister tells the story of two generations of the Nancarrow family and the high-jumping horse circuit prior to the Second World War. A love story of impossible beauty and sadness, it is also a chronicle of dreams 'turned inside out', and miracles that never last, framed against a world both tender and unspeakably hard.

Winner of the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Fiction 2012, The Age Book of the Year 2012, the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Fiction 2012
The sound of horses' hooves turns hollow on the farms west of Wirri. If a man can still ride, if he hasn't totally lost the use of his legs, if he hasn't died to the part of his heart that understands such things, then he should go for a gallop. At the very least he should stand at the road by the river imagining that he's pushing a horse up the steep hill that leads to the house on the farm once known as One Tree.
Set in hardscrabble farming country and around the country show high-jumping circuit that prevailed in rural New South Wales prior to the Second World War, Foal's Bread tells the story of two generations of the Nancarrow family and their fortunes as dictated by the vicissitudes of the land.
It is a love story of impossible beauty and sadness, a chronicle of dreams 'turned inside out', and miracles that never last, framed against a world both tender and unspeakably hard. Written in luminous prose and with an aching affinity for the landscape the book describes, Foal's Bread is the work of a born writer at the height of her considerable powers. It is a stunning work of remarkable originality and power, one that confirms Gillian Mears' reputation as one of our most exciting and acclaimed writers.
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  1. ISBN-10
    1743311850
  2. ISBN-13
    978-1743311851
  3. Edition
    1st
  4. Publisher
    Allen & Unwin
  5. Publication date
    1 September 2012
  6. Language
    English
  7. Dimensions
    13.1 x 2.7 x 19.8 cm
  8. Print length
    372 pages
  9. See all details
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Product description

About the Author

Gillian Mears grew up in the northern New South Wales towns of Grafton and Lismore. Acclaim came early, with her short-story collections and novels winning major prizes. Her books include Ride a Cock Horse, Fineflour, The Mint Lawn, The Grass Sister and A Map of the Gardens. More recently she has been living in the Adelaide Hills, where she wrote Foal's Bread.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Allen & Unwin; 1st edition (1 September 2012)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 372 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1743311850
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1743311851
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.1 x 2.7 x 19.8 cm
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 223 ratings

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Gillian Mears

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4.1 out of 5 stars
4.1 out of 5
223 global ratings

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Top reviews from Australia

Suzanne J
5.0 out of 5 stars Breathtakingly excellent
Reviewed in Australia on 26 June 2019
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Such a joy to read the work of a true craftswoman who can meld story and soul into such a real and moving story.
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Jean Seifert
4.0 out of 5 stars Australian Horses & Outback Resilience
Reviewed in Australia on 8 January 2015
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Foal's Bread is the story of an Australian family living in Northern New South Wales. They are dairy people and show jumping runs in the blood. This show jumping is the tough show jumping of the Australian country shows not the regal showjumping of upper class toffs. Life too is tough and this is a book of courage and resilience. This story starts and ends brutally with Noah the main character
yet the power of this novel is that the reader never loses empathy for her. The paths of Noah and Roley intercept where they are both entered in jumping competitions. Here begins their love story. Roley has some bad experienced of being struck by lightening no less than 3 times in his life which gradually cripples him, physically and emotionally. The great strength of this novel was the heightened language, the way that words were charged with their own kind of magic connecting all things. I knew this was a literary book when I bought it as it won the Premier’s literary award. It was also about horses with which I am familiar and love dearly. I did struggle with all those meaningful sentences until half way through the book, not because of the obvious effort of literary genius but because of the Australian vernacular that is effortlessly.
One person found this helpful
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Maureen Collard
3.0 out of 5 stars Foal's Bread
Reviewed in Australia on 16 May 2014
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Was spellbound with what these people had to go threw during their lives. Hoe would todays Families cope ?? Not well I feel.
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Sandra Radke
4.0 out of 5 stars A beautifully written strory
Reviewed in Australia on 2 June 2014
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I thoroughly enjoyed this book and it still resonates in my mind. Whether you are a "horse person" or not, the author transports the reader to northeastern New South Wales to follow the era of the high jump circuit. This is the story of Noah who, as a young girl, was deprived of parental warmth and protection and had to learn to survive the best she could. Her talent with horses attracted the love of her life to her and gave her the will and drive to succeed. With multi-level, well developed characters and themes the book explores abandonment, prejudice, incest but also survival, love and passion. Noah jumps metaphorically as well as physical over barriers to confront her struggles. She is flawed, like all of us, but her courage in the end, allows her to takes control of her life in the most heartbreaking, sacrificial and astonishing way.
2 people found this helpful
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Margaret Shabahan
4.0 out of 5 stars Yep.. I really enjoyed this book. I laughed, I cried. well written
Reviewed in Australia on 15 October 2014
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I really enjoyed this book
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MisterHobgoblin
3.0 out of 5 stars A study in brown
Reviewed in Australia on 28 November 2013
Foal's Bread has been shortlisted for two Australian prizes: the Miles Franklin and the Prime Minister's Literary Award. It feels very much like a Miles Franklin novel - hard countryside, the builder generation, poverty, despair, horses...

The cover is brown and so are the contents - brown earth, brown grass, brown rivers, brown clothes and brown horses. Following mother and daughter, Noah and Elaine Nancarrow, as they forge lives from the land; snatch moments of love in amongst the barren loathing of an extended family. The two women, and Noah's husband Rowley, live for showjumping: the high jump in particular. There are plenty of opportunities to catch the atmosphere of regional Australian country fairs: cakes, hats, dances and tents as the Nancarrows attempt to clear seven feet. Between the shows, life on the farm is hard and the wider Nancarrow family never quite accept Rowley's choice of wife. Noah is destined always to be an outsider. This is very much a character driven novel and the characters are believable, offering shades of light and dark.

The writing is mostly in a slightly opaque, folksy style. Some of the speech patterns resemble Yorkshire as much as Australia and it can take some getting used to. There is also a tendency for some of the description to focus on the detail, to such an extent that the bigger picture is missed - hence the reader might have to flick back a few pages to discover that one of the horses is, in fact, dead. That doesn't mean it's not there to be seen, but it does require quite a degree of close concentration. Coupled with this, the story can be less than gripping at times with a fair amount of repetition and the general sameness of one year after another. OK, some of the sentences and some of the images are quite lovely, and the later scenes with Uncle Owen are pretty gripping. There are also subtle undercurrents of issues that remain unresolved today. Alcohol, indigenous rights, disability and sexual abuse for starters. But these issues seldom take the centre ground; the story is about people, not issues. And horses. The opening sequences are powerful but the tension that is created is allowed to just drift off. What a pity.

The final section - the Coda - feels a little bit awkward, as though it was included as an afterthought. However, it does set a wider context and does release a slight feeling of claustrophobia that develops after being trapped in such a confined slice of history for so long.

But for all the good points - and they really are good points - as a whole the overwhelming sensation is just so much brown.

Foal's Bread does give a feel for how far Australia has come in a relatively short period of time - and also a feeling that this history is still there to be seen if we just look hard enough. There is a feeling of a lifestyle that was already dying at the time and that was helped on its way by the two wars. However, this is already a well mined seam and its products seem to get laid out on the Miles Franklin table year after year.
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sid
1.0 out of 5 stars A dud.
Reviewed in Australia on 20 November 2021
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This is more than a dud. This is a dud's dud. Absolutely terrible. Beyond words.
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Top reviews from other countries

Penny Farthing
5.0 out of 5 stars Stunning, captivating, heart-breaking...
Reviewed in the United States on 7 September 2012
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There's a moment in Foal's Bread when a main character does something so terrible I almost stopped reading. In truth that was only the first of a few such moments. However this is a work of profound beauty--a rich Australian linguistic beauty, stunningly lyrical--and to have put the book down out of squeamishness would have missed the point entirely.

Gillian Mears is a writer of incredible artistry who has turned the vernacular of an Australian rural upbringing into a kind of song. The beauties are myriad, not least being the relationship between damaged, determined equestrienne high-jumper Noah and her soulmate (if only they could say what they feel when they most need to), Roley. There's beauty in endurance, too, and in the acts of valour that take a horse over eight-foot-something rails. The lost art of equestrian high-jumping (more dare-devilry than sport) is powerfully described here, as is the strange sentimentalism that allows love for an animal to coexist alongside cruelty.

Not a book for the faint-hearted, but definitely deserving all its accolades, Foal's Bread is a once-in-a-lifetime read.
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Marigolduser
5.0 out of 5 stars High quality telling of an interesting story
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 10 February 2013
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This is a story set in Australia and follows a horse-rearing family though the years, as time and circumstance changes their lives. It is so well written that I found it difficult to settle in the the very ordinary writing of my subsequent read (A Casual Vacancy). I loved this book as the characters and their lives were so thoroughly drawn that it felt like a priviledge to know so much about their lives. It was particularly interesting as I knew nothing about that world before reding the book.
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Katherine Avery
4.0 out of 5 stars A gruelling read - a la Steinbeck
Reviewed in the United States on 9 July 2013
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I found this book tough to review and gave it 4 stars = "Liked It" (3 stars = "It's OK"). It was a tale set in the Australian bush starting some time after WWI, a time and place guaranteed to produce hardship and heartbreak. I felt the book was true to the locale and era.

When I picked the book up I found it hard to put down because I wanted to find out what happened next. However when I put it down I didn't want to pick it up because I just knew something terrible would happen. I would force myself to pick it up and then be gripped by the story and unable to put it down.

I found myself wanting it to end happily, but at the same time hoped it wouldn't because that wouldn't have stayed true to the time, the place or the theme. I loved the ending as I felt it was an appropriately poetic finish that didn't shy away from the theme.

Will I liked this book, I would not necessarily recommend it to many if any of my friends and family.
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Westwood
4.0 out of 5 stars A gritty and searing account of farming life in Australia
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 31 August 2013
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This is a stunning account of rural life in Australia during the 1930s and 1940s. It was mostly a psychological story, in particular about the effects of child abuse, and also about the power struggles within a poor farming family. The description of the life-long effects of child abuse on the main character were searingly described. The context was the hard life of outback farming, with its dangers and tensions, and also of the competition horses that were a part of daily life. The high jump competing world and the horse-riding was well described at the beginning of the book, but receded in importance towards the end. I felt that the author became more engrossed in the family tragedy that was playing out so vividly.

A very gritty novel that is moving and also painful to read.
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Lynne Fellowes
3.0 out of 5 stars I loved Gillian Mears's podcasts of living in her old ambulance ...
Reviewed in the United States on 11 June 2016
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I loved Gillian Mears's podcasts of living in her old ambulance and I spent a morning listening to the complete series. Consequently, I was eager to read Foal's Bread. I found the often-times cruel treatment of horses disturbing and I wanted to like the characters more. There were so many places this story could have gone and didn't. I love a book I can't put down, but sadly this one fell short of my expectations.
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