Kick the Latch

With its ruthless concision and artful mysteries, Kathryn Scanlan''s Kick the Latch is lightning in a bottle.Based on transcribed interviews with Sonia, a horse trainer, the novel vividly captures thearc of one woman''s life at the racetrack – the flat land and ramshackle backstretch; the bad feelings and friction; the winner''s circle and the racetrack bar; the fancy suits and fancy boots; and the ''particular language'' of ''grooms, jockeys, trainers, racing secretaries, stewards, pony people, hotwalkers, everybody'' – with economy and integrity.As Scanlan puts it, ''I wanted to preserve – amplify, exaggerate – Sonia''s idiosyncratic speech, her bluntness, her flair as a storyteller. I arrived at what you could call a composite portrait of a self.''Whittled down with a fiercely singular artistry, Kick the Latch bangs out of the starting gate and carries the reader on a careening joyride around the inside track.''A revelation in its unadorned, unromantic, plain power.'' Andrew McMillan''It''s a landscape full of exhausting labor and habitual violence, but also ecstatic devotion and joy . . . Scanlan writes about ordinary life in extraordinary ways.'' Leslie Jamison, New Yorker''I was absolutely blown away . . . A finely wrought work of art that takes one person''s life and expands it to create something wondrous and universal. The pages I read seemed to capture all that is vital to human existence.'' Tash Aw''Kick the Latch comes at you fast, and is a hell of a ride. I loved it.'' Jon McGregor''Pure exhilaration. No one works with fineness, with exactitude, with the beating heart of fiction and of life, quite like Kathryn Scanlan.'' Amina Cain''Superb . . . Niche and precise in the revelation of an ordinary life (Johnson''s Train Dreams, or Seethaler''s A Whole Life) with the distillation of Lydia Davis.'' Sinéad Gleeson''Revelatory . . . every word is essential.'' Amy Hempel''A wonderfully empathic window opened onto a fascinating life lived on the margins.'' Eric Banks''Performs the trick of turning a life . . . into art, and does so with particular charm, will, and intensity.'' Lucie Elven