You don’t have to love horses, riding, or Iceland to appreciate this fine memoir. Joan Baum, WSHU Public Radio
Those with adventurous spirits and healthy amounts of wanderlust will devour this charming memoir. Publishers WeeklyRead all reviews ›
Wild Horses of the Summer Sun is a coming-of-age story for that second stage of life, the vast years of middle-age.
Every June, the author meets up with a group of women travelers in Reykjavik before they head to a horse farm in northern Iceland, perched at the edge of the Greenland Sea.
These women leave behind the usual troubles at home: illnesses, aging parents, troubled teenagers, financial worries. Then they embark on a series of adventures and humorous misadventures. Midnight sun insomnia, randy stallions, challenging place names, never-too-late in life crushes, spirited horses. Their ‘horse sabbaticals’ in Iceland prove to be an annual escape from their ordinary lives, if only for a short while.
I live in coastal Connecticut and have been writing and publishing for decades: fiction stories, non-fiction articles, and memoir.
My first published book is my travel memoir, Wild Horses of the Summer Sun (Pegasus Books, New York, 2019; Murdoch Books UK Commonwealth, 2019), which was also translated into German (Kailash / Penguin Random House, 2020) and into Dutch (Ambo Anthos, 2020).
My deep dives: North Atlantic subarctic and Arctic places, Old Norse (Viking) history, lost tribes, horses (Icelandic), dogs (Chessies), and seabirds (Ospreys).
My favorite place in the world: where I live. And Greenland, of course.
My next book follows Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir, the most travelled woman of the Viking age. She crossed the north Atlantic to Greenland and on to Vinland, gave birth to the first European child born in North America, and late in her life walked to Rome.
The sagas remember her in fragments. I am trying to write her whole.
Read more about the Gudrid book ›
Horses, weather, the odd saga, and word on the next book. No noise, and easy to leave.
Reading with your book club? I join calls. See events ›