Mare

by Emily Haworth-Booth

A tender, profound novel about a horse and a woman, the intricacies of care, and the imaginative new ways we might live and be.

For a long time, a woman lives with her husband and their dog. She teaches writing courses, plods away at a book of her own, and doesn’t think much about not having a child. Then the dog dies, and a doctor’s visit reveals she can’t have children even if she wanted to. Out of these conditions, a sudden, strangely familiar thought horses.

When she hears about a mare whose owner needs help part-time, it seems like an ideal arrangement—and perhaps something to help with the emptiness, diagnosable and otherwise, that she’s begun to feel. She has no problem sharing; she shares a garden with the children next door and chores with her husband. The horse will be something to care for, just two days a week, without getting in too deep.

But as she takes up riding lessons and medical treatments, walks and brushes and dreams of the horse, her affection develops into obsession—forcing her to confront what it means to love a being who does not belong to her. Moving with grace, humor, and probing insight, Emily Haworth-Booth’s Mare pulses with life and feeling and introduces an irresistible literary voice.

Genres: Contemporary

288 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication March 12, 2026

About the author

London-born Emily Haworth-Booth is an award-winning author, illustrator and educator who teaches at the Royal Drawing School in London.

Alongside her children’s picture books, Emily is currently working on a long-form graphic memoir for adults. Her short comics have previously appeared in print in the Observer and Vogue and her first children’s book, The King Who Banned the Dark, was shortlisted for numerous awards including the Klaus Flugge Prize and IBW Book
Awards.

Along with her sister, Alice Haworth-Booth, she is an activist with Extinction Rebellion. The sisters are currently collaborating on Protest!, an illustrated history of peaceful protests from around the world – from 1170 BCE to the present day – which will be published by Pavilion Children's Books in spring 2021.

Reviews

[endrju]

I remember that on one of my visits to London, one of the first things I saw when I exited the King’s Cross metro station was an Extinction Rebellion protest. I also recall much of Hackney being covered in Animal Rising’s pink signage. So I was genuinely excited to read Emily Haworth-Booth’s novel, given her involvement in ER. And it is quite an interesting take on motherhood and human reproduction amid the sea of contemporary literature on the topic—precisely because she, however ambivalently, refuses to take part in it. A very welcome change of pace.

The only aspect that left me uneasy was the treatment of animals—horses, specifically—as they’re presented much like horses are elsewhere. Can’t we imagine a different non-relation with the non-human alongside a non-relation with human reproduction? I see a strong conceptual and practical link there, as does Patricia MacCormack in The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene.

[Rose Streamer · Rating 2 out of 5]

I went into Mare thinking it might have a similar dynamic to Yoders 'Nightbitch', a woman, an animal, a metaphor, but this is very much about a literal horse.


Some passages were hard hitting and refreshingly honest, about things women are often under pressure not to admit, “I knew a mother who said, for the first two years you're addicted to the smell of their head. Then the smell goes away, and you're left thinking, What have I done?” 


I wanted to empathise with the narrator and go through the grief, loss of her situation, and the complexity of her attachment to the horse. But I felt strangely apathetic. Being female and having my own experience of fertility battles wasn’t enough to bridge that gap. Perhaps I need to have some understanding of horses themselves to feel more connected (my bond with my cat just didn’t compare to what this book was trying to explore).


For me, Mare was an interesting premise, but emotionally, it didn’t pull me in the way I hoped.

Thank you to NetGalley and Granta Publications for the ARC.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 4 out of 5]

But there was no one moment I could look back on and say, That moment, that hour, that day, that thing I did or that was done to me–that was when I began to seek out horses again, or that was when I became Horse Crazy. It happened, instead, like something galloping from far away and getting nearer, the way one can suddenly become conscious of a noise long after that noise has begun to sound. By the time a siren reaches the pitch and volume at which your ears can grasp it and your brain can name it, it has already been going on for some time. Horses had moved into my consciousness slowly and then quickly, gathering pace and rhythm and volume, just how Patti Smith sang it. Horses, horses, horses, horses, horses, horses, horses horses horses horses horses horses horses HORSES HORSES HORSES HORSES HORSES HORSESHORSESHORSESHORSESHORSES HORSESHORSES Horses were just one word in the lexicon, one thing in the landscape, and then they were the only word, the only thing.

 
This is the debut literary fiction novel of a Royal Drawing School Teacher and Extinction Rebellion activist – who has won prizes for both her poetry and graphic short stories and has been listed for prestigious prizes for her first children’s picture book – and this novel too is already a prize winner for the (a magazine for women writers) Adult Novel Prize for unpublished novels.  She lives in Devon with her husband, dog and horses – which is relevant to the initial conception of the novel.
 
In the interview after that award she said “Mare emerged from a course led by the poet Rachel Long. She challenged us to write a prose poem about desire, so I wrote a love letter in second person to this horse I was looking after. It started off based on my own experience, but got longer and more fictional as I worked on it, going from second to third person, then to first person narrated by a fictional ‘I’ that wasn’t me any more.”
 
The book begins some time after the narrator (who like the author is a “author of children’s picture books with left-leaning methods”) and her husband losing their dog, and around the same time being diagnosed with Premature Ovarian Failure – which removes the possibility of having a child (although she had decided some years before that due to both the state of the world and her own feelings about her capacity to “bear the hardships of motherhood, both emotionally and physically, especially in light of said imminent [climate change induced civilisation] collapse”.).  And compounded with both of these (particularly the death of her dog) her creative output has stalled – she has gone three years since her last children’s book and now she struggles to motivate herself for a commission to write one on plastics.
 
And the key other development around that time is that she agrees to a horse-share for a mare (one that involves full care for the horse also).
 
From there the book explores over monthly chapters these different elements:
 
Her writing and online-teaching careers, which metafictionally also includes her starting to write notes on horses and horse ownership.
 
Her relationships: with the young girl not-my-daughter next door in a shared garden; with her Mum – who forwards her monthly blogs from Child-Free-Chelsey on the freedoms of a child-free life (we and she only find out later her mother’s real motivations here – the blogs themselves ending most of the chapters in what was one of the few missteps for me); with her supportive husband; with those around the yard (with all the politics and support of a yard/stables); with the horses “real mother” and later another sharer.
 
Her health which effectively involves premature/severe menopause and the need for hormone treatment.
 
Her continuing musings on motherhood/not motherhood
 
All of which is filtered, interpreted, interacted with through the medium of the key relationship in the book – that with the mare herself (even as the narrator tries to understand what it is to have a relationship with a non-human and as she learns to ride).
 
 
Now full disclosure – my daughter has a pony (not shared but in livery) and a book which combines being around and trying to understand horses with some really well written literary fiction meant that a lot of this book resonated incredibly strongly for me but will I think land very differently for others more as something different to understand via the empathy-engine of fiction; just as the choice (but also not-choice) to be childless and the left-wing activism landed with me.
 
But even putting my biases to one side I can strongly recommend this book.
 

Meanwhile the party is over the baby is crying her mother bears the whole paragraph the stiff load of justified edge-to-edge prose the weight of fiscal responsibility the no sleep the laundry the diarrhoea the new shoes the school run the cost of childcare the tears the screaming the weight of homework of screentime of the diary of sibling rivalry of Lego underfoot she bears the fevers the spit-up the future the parts per million in the atmosphere bears the atmosphere of political indifference and the weight of raising a child in a world skewing right, bears the data, bears all the girls being found in the woods–I ask the horse what I cannot ask those mothers with their very realistic babies. If I could, I would ask them so many things, but mainly how they bear it, the way I want to know how the horse does. How do they carry their children through life? How does she carry my body across fields, along lanes, round & round in circles. Is it like, I ask the horse, heaving a suitcase up a flight of stairs? Is it like this? as I push the barrow from her stable, Does it feel like this? as her buckets pull on my arms, Like this? when the sky presses down and the rain threatens to come, Does it feel like this? when I remember being held under the bodies of men both willingly and unwillingly, Is it like this?–I want to tell her that I know what it is to be under, Like this? is what I want to ask, remembering the way a body its enormous power its weight can block out the light and how depending on the body the desire the intent the day that weight can cure or suffocate it can ground or kill you–Like this? thinking about the weight of ideas, about the question, Do you have children? Didn’t you want them? Why not? Is it like that? when I ride you, Does it hurt? Or do I amount to nothing? The horse does not reply. Maybe I don’t know how to ask yet, or maybe I don’t really want to know the answer. What I want is to imagine that there is no gap between us–no space that needs to be bridged by speaking.

[Books Before Bs · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Mare’ by Emily Haworth-Booth is a quiet yet stunning novel with a simple premise: a woman in her late thirties who has decided not to have children suddenly finds she cannot have children, and when her childhood interest in horses rekindles, begins to take care of a mare part-time as a way to care for another being without the risk of her caring going too deep. Through this lens, Haworth-Booth explores the deeper themes of womanhood, mother/non-motherhood, and family in all its forms. The novel does not seek to resolve the issues raised nor present a particular argument, just shows the narrator’s feelings as they are, in all their dissonance, confusion, and complexity.

The writing is gorgeous—poetic, but not to the point of abstraction. It reminds me of Patricia Lockwood’s prose, but with a dreamier, more mellowed-out tone. Which isn’t to say it is without tension. This very interior novel maintains a note of uneasiness, an ever-teetering on the psychic edge, that draws the reader along. It feels like at any moment the narrator might be lost—engulfed by the metaphorical mist so prominent in the story. The need to see if she will make it through, if she will manage to continue to skirt that edge or perhaps escape its reach altogether, is what keeps the pages turning.

I found that I connected deeply with the narrator, and could relate to her experiences and observations. Her conflicting feelings around whether or not she wants to be a mother in the face of her infertility are particularly realistic and will resonate with many, even if they aren’t in exactly the same situation. The meditation on what family is, which is presented not in a single moment or passage, but captured by the novel as a whole, is also beautifully handled and very moving.

As someone who loves epistolary elements in a novel, I especially like the inclusion of the ‘Child-Free and Fabulous’ newsletter. Both the newsletters themselves and the narrator’s reflections on them do a lot of thematic work, and they add a touch of mystery. I only wish we could see what happened to the author of the newsletter, Chelsey, as I had theories that were never proved nor disproved. I believe the cessation of the newsletter is a thematic choice rather than a genuine loose end, but still, it leaves me wondering.

Overall, ‘Mare’ is a solid piece of literary fiction. It will suit those who enjoy poetic prose, and who are looking for a quiet, contemplative novel that prioritises depth of interiority over external action. It will resonate most with those who have experienced fertility issues or who have grappled with the question of motherhood, and those who understand the connection between a woman and her horse.

Many thanks to NetGalley, Emily Haworth-Booth and Granta Publications for the ARC.

⚠️ Infertility, animal death

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

'Mare' is a novel deep and reflective novel that explores relationships and cultural expectations from a female perspective. The main character reaches a turning point in her life, and has to deal with the fact that she cannot have children, so instead sets out to put her time and energy into looking after a horse, on a part-time basis with some others. The book deals with complex issues such as possessiveness, jealousy, non-motherhood and a growing close relationship with the horse.

I found the book very fast paced, and very well written, the book seemed to gallop away from me, not giving me the chance to feel what the main character is truly feeling. By this I mean the sentence rhythm, more so than the stories narrative. This could be a purposeful attempt at giving that sense of avoidance and that she is running away from her true feelings, or exploring them; but it felt like I never had little time for empathy.

I found the use of the horse more of a subject of distraction for the main character, and the descriptions of the horse itself, and the day-to-day maintenance and how the character feels while undertaking them is quite literal, despite the book brimming (maybe with overuse) with metaphors and similes.

Another reason I feel that I was unable to connect with the main character is the lack of depth of consequence, impact of feelings of others around her. Her external life outside of the stables seems to be very under described, and despite her husband feeling that he is sharing his wife with the horse, as she is sharing the horse with others - there's very little emotion there from the main character, and it seems very self-centered from the narrators point of view.

The most interesting aspect of the book is the way it deals with non-motherhood, whether through personal choice or for any other reason, and how that void, whether emotional or physical can be filled in other ways. It certainly gave me new insights into societies expectations of women, and especially women of a certain age, having to make important life-changing decisions, long before they feel like they need to be made.

[rsya · Rating 5 out of 5]

A clarifier: I’m a horse girlie.

I read this back in November. It’s been three months, and I still don't quite have the words—but I'll try.

You know how your brain doesn’t always care whether an experience is real or imagined? Caring for the horse on the page felt like I was living it, so much so that this inward-looking story brought its own quiet comfort. Then there is the "writing about writing" element. While I’m normally sceptical of that (it can feel so self-indulgent), here it feels right. It does not alienate the reader, well, at least not me.

Without going into the specific health issue depicted in this novel, I was nodding at every line as the narrator shared her diagnosis. When you look up a condition online (a perfectly validation-seeking behaviour if you ask me) and it says only 1% or 15% of women have it, and you've never heard anyone in your life talk about it or even be aware of it, finding it reflected in literature really gets to you. Like, really. It is that universal experience of being seen, more so when you belong to a small, select few.

I think some readers might question how much of this is autobiographical, but I do not have to know. I’ve come to accept that it does not matter. Thank you, Emily Haworth-Booth, for such an admirably beautiful piece of writing.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Granta for the eARC.

[g.m. · Rating 5 out of 5]

“If I love the horse and the horse loves the field, it still does not follow that the horse loves me, or that the field loves anyone.”

I did not expect to ever rate a book with a horse focus a 5 out of 5, but I was absolutely hooked on the narrative of this novel. From the opening few pages I thought it was going to be similar to Nightbitch (which I didn't love), but it was not — it was profoundly rooted in the mundane. It is a novel about motherhood or not being a mother — and how fulfilling quasi-maternal relationships can be sought in other ways.

The writing style of this is fragmentary which usually fails to catch my attention, but Haworth-Booth's writing is bouncy and each fragment sails nicely into another. It's short enough to not feel tiresome but long enough to create a cohesive narrative.

I think the novel was so nice to read because there was no negativity. There is a husband, a mother and society but they are all muted — nothing is ever named. The reader is conscious of societal norms and expectations and can project that onto the narrative, but at the end of the day the novel is concerned with the narrator only and her quest for finding peace with the rather rubbish cards she has been dealt.

Thank you to NetGalley and Granta Publications for the ARC

[Katrina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mare is a unique novel that tells the tale of one woman who, following the death of her dog and her own entry into early menopause, becomes increasingly fixated on a horse she begins to help care for.

The writing is gorgeous, and there’s a sense of bubbling, quiet panic beneath the prose that frustratingly never quite surfaces.

The descriptions of her time with the horse and the care she provides are very literal. While the prose remains lovely, it feels as though the narrator is using the animal as a means of escape, avoiding the elephant in the room – the fact that having children is no longer an option for her.

While this subject is touched on, and is arguably the most interesting aspect of the novel, it is never confronted head-on, which, while realistic, left me wanting more.

This is a very internal book. The narrator’s friends and family pass through the story like ghosts, and you never really get a sense of the relationships or their attachment to her.

Overall, I did enjoy the book and found it original, but I couldn’t help but want a bit more from it.

Worth a look.

With thanks to Granta for the ARC.

[Dee Hancocks · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mare is a reflective and poetic read. It focuses on a woman and her relationship with a horse. This echoes her own relationship with fertility and connection. I felt that cultural expectations and the impact on individuals was interesting. I flew through the read, it’s beautifully written and flows with a strange detachment from emotion initially to then become more feeling and accepting. I liked the journey and found the concept well executed. Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for this advanced reader copy. This is a voluntary review of my own thoughts.

[em]

DFN’d @ 38%
I could not bring myself to finish this novel, I found myself so disconnected from the author and what she was going through. The writing was lovely and flowed well, but that wasn’t enough to make up for the gap I felt as a reader. A very interesting premise, but didn’t pull through emotionally for me.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for kindly providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review. #Mare #NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

[Martha Brindley · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book had lots of premise but it failed to draw me in and hold my interest. I failed to connect and empathise with the narrator, although she is going through a really difficult time in her life, dealing with infertility and grief. The writing was a bit inconsistent and although the concept was original, it failed to hold my interest. Thanks to Net Galley for my ARC.

[tash · Rating 4 out of 5]

thank you to netgalley and grants for providing me with this arc of emily haworth-booth’s mare

4.75 stars

this was so good!! i really liked how it was written, and the premise behind it was really good! really recommend this!

[Laura · Rating 2 out of 5]

Easy to read. Flowed well. However, I didn't find it interesting.

[Toni · Rating 4 out of 5]

'Mare' by Emily Haworth-Booth is a novel that will stay with me for a long time. It is a story about horses, life, motherhood, non-motherhood and love for animals.
After the death of her beloved dog the first person narrator's attention moves back to horses and she starts caring for a mare nearby and develops a deep connection with the animal. As she is diagnosed with premature ovarian failure she ponders about motherhood and non-motherhood and what different forms being a mother can take.
This is a gentle book which also very accurately depicts the reality of caring for a horse. The novel is maybe not for everybody. But certainly a horse lover and non-mother will appreciate it and love it like I did.
Many thanks to NetGalley and Granata for giving me the opportunity to read and review this novel.

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

There was a lot to like here but unfortunately it was very inconsistent. Some passages I loved the writing and what she captured but there were large sections where I lost interest.

The main character is going through a difficult time of her life and tries to navigate in an unusual way by developing a friendship with a horse. Refreshingly for this kind of book she does seem to have good relationships with her parents and husband so the drama is more internal.

I really like the concept and what she was attempting here, I only wish the execution had been a little better.

Thanks to NetGalley and Granta for the arc.

[Gemma Seltzer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh this book! It's extraordinary and daring.

At first glance, Emily Haworth-Booth’s Mare appears to be a portrait of a woman and her horse, told amidst ‘the sweet ferment of dung and hay.’ Yet within it lies everything essential to human existence: love and intimacy, understanding and joy.

Haworth-Booth makes the private, mundane, knotty details of one woman’s days hum with life. In the quiet rituals of care—brushing, feeding, noticing—she finds a rhythm that is both tender and exacting.

This is a novel about how we might express ourselves, if only we allowed ourselves that freedom. About ways of mothering, about friendship, about connecting to both the human and more-than-human world.

“I will never know for sure what love is,” the narrator says, but each clear-sighted sentence draws her, and us, closer to understanding what it might be.

Mare is precise, vital, utterly compelling. I loved it!!!!