C.E. Morgan's novel about Kentucky horse breeders travels a long and winding road to arrive at the meat of the story—the Forge family's desperate effort to breed the next Secretariat. George Newbern's narration reflects that slow Southern pace—but without any of the atmosphere that pulls the listener into the setting. In a few character descriptions Morgan specifically mentions the drawn-out vowels of their speech, and Newbern hints at a Southern accent in these cases but then fails to maintain it. Class and race also play a strong role in the story, but little is done to verbally indicate these differences. Newbern's reading is adequate, but given the protracted story, there's nothing exceptional to keep the listener engaged in the plot's painful lulls. J.F. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

"C.E. Morgan’s The Sport of Kings takes the kind of dauntless, breathtaking chances readers once routinely expected from the boldest of American novels. . . . It is a profoundly orchestrated work that is both timeless and up-to-the-minute in its concerns, the most notable of which is what another Kentucky-bred novelist, Robert Penn Warren, once labeled 'the awful responsibility of time.'"—Judges' panel for the Kirkus Prize for Fiction

"One of this year's best novels."—The Boston Globe

"Magnificent."—GQ

"C.E. Morgan has more nerve, linguistic vitality, and commitment to cosmic thoroughness in one joint of her little finger than the next hundred contemporary novelists have in their entire bodies and vocabularies."—The New York Times Book Review

"C.E. Morgan tackles destiny, race, love, and family with such thought-provoking, stunning prose that even at its most disturbing, it’s beautiful to read. This book is destined to be an American classic. I haven’t read anything this powerful, moving, and jaw-dropping in many years."—The San Diego Union-Tribune

"Ravishing and ambitious . . . [A] serious and important novel."—The New York Times

"[A]sprawling, magisterial Southern Gothic for the twenty-first century."—O, The Oprah Magazine

“Majestic and sorrowful . . . With this extraordinary work, C.E. Morgan moves into the front rank of contemporary writers.”—Newsday

"Everyone thinks [The Sport of Kings] is about horse racing, when it’s really about everything: love, race, legacy, family, justice, poverty, and American inequality. On top of that, it’s one of the most gorgeous books I’ve read in many years. When I finished the book, I immediately called a friend and said 'this book is precisely why I do the work I do.'"—Lisa Lucas, executive director of the National Book Foundation, for The Millions (A Year in Reading)

"A world-encompassing colossus of a second novel . . . Constantly invigorating,surprising, and transfixing."—The Times Literary Supplement

"[A]sweeping, ambitious novel . . . Spectacularly well-written."—The Wall Street Journal

"Remarkable achievements . . . The Sport of Kings hovers between fiction, history, and myth, its characters sometimes like the ancient ones bound to their tales by fate, its horses distant kin to those who drew the chariot of time across the sky . . . Novelists can do things that other writers can’t—and Morgan can do things that other novelists can’t . . . Tremendous, the work of a writer just starting to show us what she can do."—The New Yorker

"Vivid epic of rage and racism on a Kentucky stud farm exposes the myth of the American dream."—The Spectator (UK)

"Spirited, fast and almost perfectly formed."—The Times (UK)

"With The Sport of Kings, C. E. Morgan has delivered a masterpiece. Rich, deep, and ambitious, this book is, by any standard, a Great American Novel."—Philipp Meyer, author of The Son

"[The Sport of Kings] is an epic novel steeped in American history and geography . . . Morgan’s gothic tale of Southern decadence deepens into a searing investigation of racism’s enduring legacy . . . Vaultingly ambitious, thrillingly well-written, charged with moral fervor and rueful compassion. How will this dazzling writer astonish us next time?"—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Morgan has dared to write the kind of book that was presumed long extinct: a high literary epic of America."—The Telegraph (UK)

"Sport of Kings boasts a plot that maintains tension and pace, and Morgan weaves its characters, its themes, its several histories together in a marvelous display of literary control and follow-through."—Christian Science Monitor

"[A] rich and compulsive new novel . . . This book confirms [Morgan] as the new torchbearer of the Southern Gothic tradition. . . . What emerges is a panoramic view of race relations in America, from the slow crumbling of the Jim Crow laws until shortly before the election of Barack Obama, with occasional glimpses into the more distant past. Racing provides the novel’s overarching metaphor for race (a set of tracks that determine the course of a life, and for which the correct breeding is essential), and Morgan’s white characters are hardly less constricted by history than her black ones. . . . It’s a bleak and bitter inversion of the American dream — a world in which circumstances are impossible to change, and legacies impossible to shake. . . . [Morgan is] . . . an immersive storyteller. . . . Her prose is often ravishingly beautiful, displaying an unerring instinct for metaphor and music."—The Financial Times

12/01/2015
After Morgan debuted with the starkly beautiful All the Living, she was named a National Book Foundations 5 under 35 honoree and one of The New Yorker's 20 Best Writers Under 40. Her new novel, again set in Kentucky, features old-line Southerner Henry Forge, who's trying to change directions by breeding horses on the family's crop farm. Dark secrets come out when he and daughter Henrietta hire black ex-convict Allmon Shaughnessy to work in the stables. Racing by: a fiery filly named Hellsmouth.

C.E. Morgan's novel about Kentucky horse breeders travels a long and winding road to arrive at the meat of the story—the Forge family's desperate effort to breed the next Secretariat. George Newbern's narration reflects that slow Southern pace—but without any of the atmosphere that pulls the listener into the setting. In a few character descriptions Morgan specifically mentions the drawn-out vowels of their speech, and Newbern hints at a Southern accent in these cases but then fails to maintain it. Class and race also play a strong role in the story, but little is done to verbally indicate these differences. Newbern's reading is adequate, but given the protracted story, there's nothing exceptional to keep the listener engaged in the plot's painful lulls. J.F. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine