**NATIONAL BESTSELLER – From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of *A Thousand Acres* comes an irresistibly smart, witty, and engaging chronicle of a novelist’s lifelong obsession with horses. **- **Exuberant…witty, completely delightful…. A kind of *National Velvet* for adults. — *San Francisco Chronicle* ** Every horse story is a love story, writes Jane Smiley, who has loved horses for most of her life and owned and bred them for a good part of it. To love something is to observe it with more than usual attention, and that is precisely what Smiley does in this In particular she follows a sexy filly named Waterwheel and a grey named Wowie (he tells a horse communicator that he wants it changed from Hornblower) as they begin careers at the racetrack. Filled with humor and suspense, and with discourses on equine intelligence, affection, and character, *A Year at the Races* is a winner.