Mare

by Emily Haworth-Booth

'For a long time I had not been that person. For a long time horses had not occurred to me at all.'

For a long time, she and her husband have their dog and she almost certainly doesn't want to have a child. But then the dog dies and she learns she can't have a child even if she wanted to, and she begins to think about horses again. When she hears about a mare who needs looking after part-time, it sounds like an ideal arrangement. Something to care for two days a week, without getting in too deep. But as she brushes and feeds and rides the horse, affection grows into obsession and she must confront what it means to love a being who did not come from her body and who does not belong to her.

Emily Haworth-Booth's award-winning debut novel is a bold and beautiful exploration of contemporary (non)motherhood and the surprising ways in which desire can enthral us and set us free.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, Horses, Audiobook, Adult Fiction

281 pages, Kindle Edition

First published 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

[Alwynne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Writer and illustrator Emily Haworth-Booth’s hypnotic, incredibly accomplished debut novel is difficult to pin down. It’s far more than the sum of its parts. Although it’s been compared to non-fiction like H is for Hawk, it’s not an ‘animal’ story in that sense – all else aside it’s concerned with kinship rather than mastery. Haworth-Booth has called it a book about (non)motherhood which it is. But it also intersects with explorations of interspecies relationships; of the process of writing; of community and who decides what family might consist of; of gendered bodies and the storylines imposed on women; and of the possibility of going beyond the binary of baby/no baby.

It’s both restless and contemplative, as is its narrator. Like Haworth-Booth she’s a children’s author and creative writing tutor who’s attempting to address a series of abrupt life changes. One is the loss of her dog tangled up with unresolved – perhaps unresolvable - grief and confusion over the loss of fertility following a diagnosis of premature menopause. All of which links to a sudden inability to write. But this is not so much a lament about childlessness or what it is to be childless versus childfree. It’s about mourning – and what can be salvaged from loss - in a wider sense. Haworth-Booth is known for her activism in groups like Extinction Rebellion. Her narrator’s not explicitly protesting in the same way but has made decisions about how to live based on her keen awareness of the impact of climate change. Now in her late thirties, this knowledge has informed her decision to be childfree. But it’s a different thing to make a decision than it is to have control wrested from you.

Her time is suddenly taken up with trips to clinics where doctors experiment with hormonal therapies, hinting at the complexity of her case – at risk now, it seems, of numerous dire conditions, already developing arthritis. The medication prescribed troubles too her sense of the interplay between her mind and her body. She finds herself filled with a longing to return to her teenage fascination with horses. A quest that leads to an unexpectedly intense bond with a horse, referred to only as ‘mare, sharing her care with one, eventually two other women.

This increasingly-intimate bond leads to the narrator’s thinking through of unsanctioned, uncategorisable desire, a love for a member of an entirely other species that cannot be reduced to notions of compensation or substitution for the supposedly maternal. A love that leads to trying to create a connection that goes against available scripts, that isn’t about control or ownership. It also embeds the narrator in an alternative community of women all centred around the stables where the mare eventually ends up. One that’s radically other than that of her friends, many of whom have now had children, enmeshed in the cultural roles assigned to the category mother. The narrator’s also caught up in working out how to live in the world that is, while wishing that the world was other - that the waters weren’t rising, that species weren’t dying. But it’s not an excessively downbeat book: it’s tender, frequently witty, pierced with bursts of poetry – often in conversation with writers that include Audre Lorde, Sontag, de Beauvoir; managing to be atmospheric and elegant without erasing rougher edges. Did I always agree with the narrator’s observations? No. But this isn’t about providing neat answers, it’s about journey more than it is resolution. And, as such, it’s exceptionally arresting and definitely memorable.

Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Granta for an ARC

[Jillian B · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m not a horse girl. I went to riding camp one summer as a kid, but the equine obsession never found me. But if anything could turn me into one, it would be this short and sweet jewel of a book. It follows a woman who was happily child-free, but finds herself inexplicably mourning when she goes into early menopause at 39. She finds meaning through co-ownership of a horse.

This book’s prose is simply gorgeous. It’s simple and lyrical at the same time. This author has written children’s books but I believe this is her adult debut, and it really shows the mastery over language that children’s authors have.

I also liked that this book explores the experience of being sort of ambiguously child-free. The main character never questions her choice not to have children, until the option is prematurely taken from her. But she ultimately feels like she made the right decision. This isn’t some sort of pronatalist story about how people who don’t have kids always regret it. Instead, it’s a very real-feeling exploration of the ways that making a decision, even the right one, can come with mourning of the paths not taken.

And like I said, this book makes riding and caring for horses sound so cool that I briefly considered riding lessons before coming to my senses! This is such a gem of a book.

Thank you to the publisher for giving me access to an eARC of this book!

[Sam Cheng · Rating 4 out of 5]

Haworth-Booth’s Mare is a beautifully unique piece. It reads like a memoir, so much so that I stopped midway to check if “a novel” on the cover was accurate. The author folds in common real-life storytelling characteristics, such as her (a) interactions with her husband, mother, friends, neighbors, doctors, and academic interlocutors; (b) reading newsletter updates via email, and (c) non-linear internal fact processing with the help of a mare. It’s a refined, fictitious look at the process of grieving not having the choice to have biological children because of a Premature Ovarian Insufficiency diagnosis.

The social interactions our first-person narrator navigates—“Are you really OK with this?” (pp. 22–24)—closely resemble reality, centering on the role of being a mother and maternal figure. The “Do you think you want…?” questions, well-intentioned as they may be, hit different when the decision to pursue trying to conceive (naturally and with Assisted Reproductive Technology) is not in the cards due to “atrophied ovaries” in a “dried out womb.” Haworth-Booth candidly yet gently confronts this reality; I can’t think of another book that succeeds as she does, which is massive because commonplace conversations about complex gynae appointments, just-in-case egg freezing, and infertility.

A woven, porous family, complete with biological and non-biological members, can parallel experimental forms of literature: “Why shouldn’t we mix anything we like into the pot? The boundaries are blurring[.]... This is the age of the nonbinary, the hybrid, the broken, the fused, the uncategorizable.” If we can move beyond bitterness or dishonest ambivalence, we can arrange an expansive custody that shares.

I am eager to put Mare in the hands of my girl-friends who long to be parents (now that I think about it, I will encourage guy-friends to pick this up too for a glimpse into motherhood, broadly speaking). However, I would also want to time this carefully because of the author’s incisive, honest reflections and sober, intelligent writing (e.g., the true-mother and not-my-daughter). I had to put the novel down at one point. But I returned to it quickly, keen to follow where Haworth-Booth would guide me next.

I rate Mare 4.5 stars.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is the entire novel built around a pun? The French for mother, mère, is a homophone for mare. Like Motherhood by Sheila Heti, this is a work of autofiction that circles the question of becoming a mother and posits the writing life and other relationships as partial substitutes for parenthood. But yes, there is also a literal horse. The narrator lives in London with her husband and scrapes together a living by teaching creative writing on Zoom and writing children’s books. They’ve recently lost their dearly loved dog and are friendly with the neighbours whose garden they share and whose noise they hear the other side of a wall – so much so that she thinks of the two girls as “not-my-daughter” and “also-not-my-daughter.” The narrator is contracted to write a book about plastics for children but can’t seem to land on the right tone somewhere between alarm and false cheer. Approaching age 40, she’s finally coming to terms with the fact that she won’t be a mother due to premature ovarian failure.

Into all this comes the love of a horse. She finds a stable two miles away and spends three days a week there riding and tending to a black and white mare. As a child she’d been horse-crazy, so this isn’t “a new feeling … but a resurgence. Deeply familiar. Lust and tenderness and hope mingled.” Time with the horse reminds her to be present, to live in her body despite its flaws, to take joy in the everyday. “Being with the horse has come to feel more and more like an exercise in metaphor.”

Haworth-Booth makes caring for an animal analogous with motherhood, but doesn’t stop at easy symbolism. The mare might stand in for female fear and vulnerability, but is also flesh and blood. Cultivating bodily bonds with other creatures is part of how we find purpose when life is threatened by chronic illness and climate breakdown.

This is Haworth-Booth’s adult debut and I hope it will be submitted for next year’s McKitterick Prize. Its wry honesty appealed to me, as did the narrator’s interactions with her mother (who forwards her “Childfree and fabulous” e-newsletters) and not-my-daughter, who share her interest in horses. There’s also the meta angle of the narrator assembling an “H folder” that eventually becomes this book. Hard to tell in my Kindle file, but some passages seem to be aligned like poetry. “The boundaries are blurring … this is the age of the non-binary, the hybrid, … the uncategorisable,” the narrator says to her students. “What about a collection of thoughts themed around a subject, themed around, for example, a horse?” I can see how some would find this insufferable, but it really worked for me.

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

[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.

[Robyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The horse moves with short staccato steps, reflecting my uncertainty back to me. Her ears swivel and her head rotates left right left right looking out, I can only assume, for danger. Because this is the way I have always walked through the city alone at night. To be a horse then is something like being female. We move through the world the same way, with trepidation, ears straining for the sound of difference. Snapping twigs, footsteps behind. The tremor of earth that suggests another body is moving quickly towards our own through the bracken, the shadows. We know what it is to be prey.” 🥹

[Jamad · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mare is a slim, slightly elusive novel that doesn’t so much tell a story as circle around a feeling. At its centre is a woman coming to terms with not having children, and who ends up forming an intense, somewhat puzzling attachment to a horse she helps look after. That premise might sound a bit odd, and the book never really tries to make it less so.

The writing is the real draw. It’s spare, fragmentary, and often very precise about the physical and emotional details — hospital visits, conversations that don’t quite land, the awkwardness of other people’s assumptions. There’s a quiet confidence to it, and at its best it captures something difficult to articulate about grief and identity.

But it does feel quite closed in. Everything is filtered so tightly through the narrator that the rest of the world barely gets a look in. Even the central relationship with the horse, which ought to carry more weight, remains a bit abstract. I kept waiting for it to deepen or shift in some way, and it never quite did.

There’s plenty here to admire, and it’s certainly distinctive, but it also feels a little slight — more a series of impressions than something that fully comes together. An interesting debut.

[Zoe Lask · Rating 4 out of 5]

A love letter to all the horse girls

[Sophia Eck]

A poignant debut novel chronicling a woman’s search for something to center her devotion upon, if not upon a dog, if not upon a child, but upon a horse. Haworth-Booth asks the question of where a woman can place her devotion and love if not in the stereotypical places, like domesticated pets, or children, or work, or her husband, and discusses the displacement and loneliness one can feel when unable to develop their life how they planned, or how the traditional world planned for them. Haworth-Booth manages to weave in meaningful literary references, unique tracks of writing, and the layers to a woman’s devotion. The novel feels like a sort of eavesdropping upon the unspoken conversations between a woman and the animal she feels knows her better than anyone; very reflective, interior, and quietly thoughtful.

[Ruby Yassen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I knew I would love this book, and I really did. Basically like if Sheila Heti was a perimenopausal horsegirl (many people’s worst nightmare), which is literally my dream book. I loved everything about this book, and i found it incredibly moving . I loved the way she writes about motherhood - as something that moves in multiple, reciprocal directions between mothers and daughters and women more generally speaking - Sheila Heti introduced me to this idea and I’ve resonated with it for years.

And the horse of it all !!!!!! The perfect book for me ♥️🐴🐴🐴🐴

[TJ Book Ninja]

DNF at 143 pages. I could not relate to the main character. I did not like the writing style, it was in short little paragraphs and in some of the paragraphs she was going through her health issues, not being able to conceive a child and then to make up for that. She was obsessed with this horse. I guess in a good way. She really use the horse as a metaphor for the love that she would have given a child. But I just felt like this story kind of went all over the place and I had to pull the plug. It was just not keeping my interest.

[Jessica Boyter · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strong 4.5. Reads like a poetic memoir. I loved the creative weaving of care for a horse, care for not-her-children, changes in her body…and how that coincides with her not being a biological parent. Lovely writing.

[miranda janisse · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Susan Harris · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don’t know what is going on in today’s literary world. Recently, the “novels” I have been reading are really tell-it-all pseudo memoirs. They have no structure; there is no high point where things start to get explained.

In “Mare” we have a woman who is in early menopause and is suffering because she cannot bear children. As an ersatz to her non-children, she becomes attached to the girls next door, whom she calls, throughout the book, “not-my-daughter” and “also-not-my-daughter.” She also becomes attached to a horse, who is always referred to as “the horse.” The horse’s owner is simply “the real mother.”

No one has a name, not even the woman’s husband, who is there as an asterix, you might say. If they have any interaction at all, it is held from us.

There is a lot of detail about how one takes care of horses, how one cleans out the stall, how one feeds it, etc. There is also quite a lot of detail about her early menopause condition and her treatments for it. We are reminded, several times, of unhappy she is that she cannot children.

Call me hard-hearted, but I cannot relate to a book like this. I love horses, and as a mother and grandmother I do understand why a woman wants children. But this was just plain boring. I would like to have felt sorry for the woman, to sympathize with her. Instead, it even made me a little bit angry.

[Susan Fichandler · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t think I should rate my books with stars anymore. I find myself thinking too much about how others may like the book and whether I think the book is objectively good vs how much i enjoyed reading it. From now on I won’t use stars . I loved this book . But I don’t know if you will .

[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.

[Fenni · Rating 3 out of 5]

Horse girl meets existential crisis

[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.

[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.

[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.

[sam · Rating 3 out of 5]

⭐⭐⭐¾

*Mare* by Emily Haworth-Booth is such an interesting, quietly emotional exploration of grief, desire, identity, and the complicated expectations surrounding motherhood. I went into this expecting a fairly straightforward story about a woman and a horse, but it ended up being much more introspective and layered than I anticipated.

The premise really drew me in. After losing her beloved dog and discovering that she can't have children, the unnamed narrator finds herself unexpectedly drawn back towards horses. When she begins caring for a mare part-time, what starts as something fairly simple gradually becomes much more consuming. I really liked the way the relationship with the horse develops slowly, with affection eventually becoming something closer to obsession. There was something fascinating about watching her try to understand why she feels so strongly about this animal and what that attachment says about her own life.

One of my favourite aspects was the book's exploration of motherhood and the idea that nurturing doesn't necessarily have to look the way society expects it to. The narrator doesn't initially want children, but once that possibility is taken away from her, her feelings become much more complicated. I thought the book did a great job of sitting in that uncomfortable space between *not wanting something* and *grieving the fact that you can no longer have it*. It never felt completely black and white, which made her internal journey feel quite authentic.

The relationship between the narrator and the mare was also beautifully portrayed. There is something almost unsettling about how quickly caring for the horse becomes such an important part of her identity. The horse isn't simply a replacement for a child or a pet, and I appreciated that the story doesn't reduce their relationship to that. Instead, it explores what it means to love and care for another living being while knowing that they aren't really yours.

I also really enjoyed the writing. It's reflective and atmospheric, with a slightly dreamlike quality that suited the subject matter. There are moments that feel incredibly intimate, particularly when the narrator is thinking about her body, her relationships, grief, and what she believes she is supposed to want from life. At times it was uncomfortable, but I think that discomfort was intentional and made the story more thought-provoking.

That said, this was definitely a slower and more introspective read than I expected. There were moments where I found myself wanting the story to move forward a little more, and some of the narrator's thoughts became repetitive for me. I also didn't always feel emotionally connected to her, despite understanding what the author was trying to explore. Because of that, I didn't completely love the book as much as I wanted to.

Still, *Mare* is a beautifully unusual novel. I really appreciated how it takes something as simple as caring for a horse and uses it to explore much bigger questions about grief, motherhood, femininity, longing, and the ways we look for something to care about when our lives don't turn out quite how we imagined.

It won't be for everyone, especially if you're looking for a plot-heavy story, but if you enjoy literary fiction that is introspective, slightly strange, and willing to sit with complicated emotions, I think this is worth picking up.

A thoughtful, beautifully written and surprisingly affecting read. I didn't connect with every part of it, but there was plenty here that stayed with me after finishing. **3.75 stars!**

[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

[Linnea · Rating 4 out of 5]

**Thank you to Netgalley for the early review copy in exchange for an honest review.**

Mare had me sitting up straighter in my reading chair from the very first page. In fact, looking back, I think I can confidently say it has one of the strongest opening sections I've read in a long time. Emily Haworth-Booth's prose is not only stunning, but something about it made me realize I was dealing with something apart from all other introspective "millennial" fiction pieces I've read recently. I was initially drawn to pick it up for its familiar (and to me ever-intriguing) themes of childlessness (voluntary or involuntary), non-traditional forms of intimacy and care, grief, and the profound bonds that can exist between humans and animals -- but I soon realized this was a different tack entirely.

As someone who spent years as a secret horse girl, I found the book especially resonant. It brought back memories of complicated girlhood feelings, loving horses but instinctively knowing I needed to hide that love for fear it would be seen as uncool or in need of justification. Haworth-Booth captures that impulse to defend non-traditional forms of love and care with remarkable sensitivity.

That said, my enthusiasm waned towards the middle of the book. I'm generally very happy to follow books that prioritize reflection over plot, but when there's no plot to drive the narrative forward, I want to at least feel a sense of progression in the ideas or emotional conversations it invites the reader into. For me, this is where Mare lost a little momentum and the novel began to drag.

Even so, this is one of the most exciting new-to-me voices I've read in quite some time. Haworth-Booth has a distinctive, thoughtful voice, and I'll be eagerly reading whatever she writes next.

[André LR · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pressure without counterweigh

Emily Haworth-Booth's Mare follows a childless woman in early menopause who becomes intensely attached to a shared horse she does not own. She has access but no claim. She participates in care but cannot secure it. The novel builds its pressure through repetition, then tests whether it can be sustained across relations rather than contained within a single consciousness. It is working towards a form of attachment outside reproductive categories, where care and repetition carry meaning without resolving loss.

The book proceeds by return rather than escalation. Stable work, riding, feeding and watching recur with minor variation. These sequences operate at the level of objects and tasks. Hands, tools and routines organise attention. Repetition alters perception. It does not resolve the relation. It wears at it without clarifying it. The more often the routines are performed, the clearer it becomes that care does not accumulate into possession.

That structure requires resistance. The mare provides it. She resists interpretation, misaligns, withdraws and fails to respond in expected ways. The relation remains unstable and only partially knowable. This uncertainty generates force rather than simply preventing projection. It keeps the attachment open and under strain.

Elsewhere the system is weaker..... Full review at https://www.notesonbooks.net/mare/

Advance reading copy provided by NetGalley and Granta.

[Victoria · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a story about a mare, but also about so much more. It is about women, motherhood, the desire—or inability—to have a child, and, above all, about love. The narrator finds herself approaching forty without children and without the possibility of having one. Then she meets a mare, and a deep love gradually develops between them. Through the animal, she reconnects with her own body, learns to give affection again, and finds a way to overcome fear. The questions the book raises are difficult and deeply personal: Is it possible to live a fulfilling life without children? Can love for an animal compensate for the love one might have for a child? Can that love be shared with children who are not our own? And how do you deal with a society—and with other people—who seem to think that a woman’s life can always be measured by whether or not she has children? Haworth-Booth explores these questions without anger or bitterness. Instead, the love she feels for the mare shines through every page, making me think that love for another living being can be just as profound and complete as the love for a child. I started this book thinking I had long since passed the age when I wanted to read books about horses, but this is more than a book about horses. I was completely drawn into it. A beautiful, thoughtful and deeply moving story.

https://redheadwithabrain.ch/index.ph...

[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.

[Nessa Velez · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a beautiful read, the interconnections the author makes between motherhood, womanhood and taking care of a horse is captivating. In itself this is a story about connection with yourself, of growth in the face of grief and pain. It is written in a way where you feel as the characters feels, because she expresses it so well.

The story is about a woman who is going through the natural changes of her body letting go of the “fértile” stage of life and move into the menopause face. As she was never able to have children, even though it was something she truly wanted, it becomes the guide of the story. Her grief of letting go of that part of her life, that hope and how in this process she decides to care for a horse, in part as a distraction but in a very big part as healing.

I love how the Mare is present in all of the story; the way she cares for it and the progression into growing along her security and letting go of her pain little by little.

The writing style is very unique and I did enjoy it. Like sipping from a hot cup of tea and enjoying it slowly and truly. It is lyrical, real and honest.

[Lillian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Emily Haworth-Booth’s lyrical debut novel features a woman who has struggled with the very realistic conflict over the decision of whether or not to become a mother only to find the decision taken out of her hands through the intervention of medical complications.

A childhood love of horses resurfaces and our narrator shares the care of a female horse part time to fill the void.

It is through the lens of the horse that our narrator is able to explore and contemplate her own fertility struggles, ideas of womanhood, and motherhood. The reader becomes immersed in the narrator’s internal world that through skilled writing never seems oppressive.

Haworth-Booth’s rhythmic, poetic prose, though quiet and meditative, is simultaneously propulsive, such that the reader grapples alongside the narrator.

One of the charming aspects is how the narrator refers to the two young children living next door. The older one is called ‘not-my-daughter’ and the younger one ‘also not-my-daughter’.

Above everything lies the unique bond that we humans share with animals, posing the question, what makes a family?