You don’t have to love horses, riding, or Iceland to appreciate this fine memoir. Joan Baum, WSHU Public Radio
One of the best books for travel inspiration of 2020. Travel + Leisure
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.
Those with adventurous spirits and healthy amounts of wanderlust will devour this charming memoir. Publishers WeeklyRead all reviews ›
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.
I am finishing a historical novel about an early female explorer, Gudrid the Far Traveler, who lived over a thousand years ago. She crossed the North Atlantic several times, sailing from Iceland to Greenland to North America. Based loosely on the Vinland Sagas, it is my interpretation of her life and times. In a way, it is also a travel memoir.
The sagas tell only fragments of her life. I am trying to write her whole.
Read more about the Gudrid book ›
New writing, whatever research I have fallen into, and word on the next book.
Reading with your book club? I join calls. See events ›