The Australian writer Gillian Mears’ award-winning Foal’s Bread is one of the most absorbing novels I’ve read in years. It returned me to some of the pleasures of the old-fashioned realist novel: an engrossing plot that kept me reading late into the night; complex characters in a densely realised social and historical setting; an expansive, compassionate vision of life. It’s about the glory days and the decline of show jumping competitions in rural New South Wales, from the 1920s through to the present day; and not being a horsey kind of woman, I wasn’t convinced I would enjoy it.

But it’s about so much more than equine escapades. It deals with both the joys and corrosive estrangements of marriage and family; the rewards and hardships of manual labour; masculine pride and vulnerability; the tenderness and ferocity of motherhood; the beauty and terror of the natural world; the heartbreak of bodily and emotional paralysis; the acceptance, indeed the embracing, of an intellectually handicapped child. I was swept away by its wonderful blend of the vernacular and the poetic, the ordinary and the ecstatic. By its carefully observed moments of intimacy and the painful, unbridgeable gap between loved ones. By the cumulative, brooding power through which it narrates the passing of the years. Part elegy for a lost love and a way of life, part fable, part bush yarn, it is also a work of great emotional generosity. Like the great humanist novels of the nineteenth century, Foal’s Bread asks its readers to understand rather than judge its characters, to extend to them the kindness and loving care they often crave and so rarely find. Knowing about Mears’ crippling and courageous battle with MS also made me acutely aware of the importance in her novel of bodily movement—the exhilaration of show-jumping in particular and, more generally, the intense pleasure of embodied experience in its various and wondrous forms. It’s the kind of novel that makes you want to re-read it as soon as you’ve finished, because you know you’ve missed so much of its subtlety the first time around.