Rough Magic

"Lara's searingly honest account of her astonishing rise from hopeless underdog to Mongol Derby Champion leaves grit in your teeth and dust in your hair. I laughed, I cried and I felt every bruise. I was riveted til the last word and left with lasting daydreams of Mongolian horizons."—Felicity Aston, author of Alone in Antarctica, The First Woman To See Solo Across the Southern Ice At the age of nineteen, Lara Prior-Palmer discovered a website devoted to "the world's longest, toughest horse race"—an annual competition of endurance and skill that involves dozens of riders racing a series of twenty-five wild ponies across 1,000 kilometers of Mongolian grassland. On a whim, she decided to enter the race. As she boarded a plane to East Asia, she was utterly unprepared for what awaited her. Riders often spend years preparing to compete in the Mongol Derby, a course that recreates the horse messenger system developed by Genghis Khan, and many fail to...