All the Horses of Iceland

by Sarah Tolmie

Overview

A New York Times Best Fantasy of 2022!

“All the Horses of Iceland is a slim and beautiful chronicle in the tradition of Naomi Mitchison and Ursula K. Le Guin. …The result is a sorcerous journey through hospitality and enchantment.” —The New York Times

A hypnotic historical fantasy with gorgeous and unusual literary prose, from the captivating author of The Fourth Island.

Everyone knows of the horses of Iceland, wild, and small, and free, but few have heard their story. Sarah Tolmie’s All the Horses of Iceland weaves their mystical origin into a saga for the modern age. Filled with the magic and darkened whispers of a people on the cusp of major cultural change, All the Horses of Iceland tells the tale of a Norse trader, his travels through Central Asia, and the ghostly magic that followed him home to the land of fire, stone, and ice. His search for riches will take him from Helmgard, through Khazaria, to the steppes of Mongolia, where he will barter for horses and return with much, much more.

All the Horses of Iceland is a delve into the secret, imagined history of Iceland's unusual horses, brought to life by an expert storyteller.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250807939
Publisher:	Tor Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/01/2022
Pages:	112
Sales rank:	204,927
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Sarah Tolmie is the author of the Tordotom novella The Fourth Island, the poetry collections Check and The Art of Dying, the 120-sonnet sequence Trio, and the chapbook Sonnet in a Blue Dress and Other Poems. She has also published the novels The Little Animals and The Stone Boatmen, as well as the short fiction collections Two Travelers and NoFood. She is a medievalist trained at the University of Toronto and Cambridge and is a Professor of English at the University of Waterloo.

Editorial Reviews

12/20/2021

Tolmie (The Fourth Island) sends an Icelandic trader thousands of miles searching for horses to bring home in this charming historical novella adorned with ghosts, magic, and tribal warfare. In the ninth century, Eyvind and fellow trader David hope to get rich through horse trading, a valuable commodity on the cold, rocky island of Iceland. This ambition takes them through Rus and Khazaria to the grassy steppes of Mongolia, where the men meet a chieftain willing to trade his horde of horses if Eyvind, whom the chieftain believes is a magician, will dispel the ghost of Bortë, one of his wives, who’s haunting his tribe and terrorizing his horses. With the help of Bortë’s mother, Eyvind calms the ghost, who then takes the form of a beautiful white mare that no one in the tribe can see. Rewarded with 25 horses, including this mystical mare, Eyvind and David make the dangerous trek back, along the way facing battlefields, bandits, and toll collectors. In the sparse but elegant style of ancient fables, Tolmie weaves a saga of whimsy and magic against a lavish historical backdrop. Historical fantasy fans are sure to root for this reluctant hero and his fabulous beasts. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

A New York Times Best Fantasy of 2022!

“All the Horses of Iceland is a slim and beautiful chronicle in the tradition of Naomi Mitchison and Ursula K. Le Guin. …The result is a sorcerous journey through hospitality and enchantment.” —The New York Times

“Sarah Tolmie has a light touch, a powerful voice, and a vivid sense of place and period.” —Elizabeth Bear

“Tolmie brings a scholarly precision to her fantasy that makes magic mundane and the mundane utterly sublime . . . deeply refreshing, a kind of grace.” —The New York Times

From the Publisher