by RosalindBelben (Author)
Philomena, fat and lazy when she is requisitioned from an English field at the start of the First World War, sails for Egypt with the territorial regiment, the Dorset Yeomanry. She serves faithfully, charging the dervishes in the Western Desert and enduring the privations of Allenby's great campaign in Palestine. She recovers from wounds to swelter through a summer in the Jordan Valley. She takes part in the triumphant advance on Damascus - only to be sold off in Cairo among the 22,000 horses left behind by the War Office after the Armistice. By 1921, the forceful Griselda Romney, a war widow - in the author's "Hound Music" she was a child - has discovered that her old hunter, Philomena, could be still alive. With her six-year-old daughter, and of course Nanny, Mrs Romney sets out to Egypt, to find Philomena and to rescue her..."Our Horses in Egypt" depicts the work of a troop-horse in the Army - and of exotic Cairo, in political unrest - as meticulously and exuberantly as "Hound Music" recreated the milieu of Edwardian fox-hunting.
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 320
Publisher: Chatto & Windus
Published: 15 Feb 2007
ISBN 10: 070117594X
ISBN 13: 9780701175948
Book Overview: Historical novel about horses in the First World War (in Egypt and Palestine). An astonishing literary tour-de-force.
Prizes: Shortlisted for James Tait Black Memorial Book Prizes: Fiction 2008.