The Horse Whisperer

The Horse Whisperer is a novel by the English writer Nicholas Evans, published in 1995 and his first book.

Annie and Grace are both difficult in ways that the accident makes worse: Grace, thirteen and permanently injured, has withdrawn from her mother and father, and Annie responds to a problem she cannot arrange by finding an expert, which is how she learns of a horseman in Montana who is said to be able to work with animals that nobody else can reach. The novel's structure is a journey and then a long stay, and much of what changes is not the horse. Evans writes the working life of a ranch closely enough for the horse training to be the spine of the book, and he keeps the parents' marriage and the daughter's recovery in the same frame, so the reader is always aware of who is paying for Annie's decisions. It became one of the best-selling novels of the 1990s, with more than fifteen million copies sold and tenth place on the American list for 1995, and Robert Redford directed and starred in the film version.