Flirting with danger and despair

Clover Stroud was 16 and reading about the Suez Crisis in double history when her idyllic life was ripped into ‘before’ and ‘after’. The headmaster poked his head into the class and fished her out to mumble something in the corridor about an incident involving her mother.

‘Mum’s accident,’ as Stroud comes to think of this catastrophic punctuation point, proved about as bad as could be without being fatal. Falling from her horse into a deep coma, her mother awakens permanently brain-damaged and unable to communicate.

As a little girl, Stroud had made her mother promise never to die. But death, as she concedes in this raw, honest memoir, would have brought with it the balm of ritual. Instead, the family is left in limbo, and although her mother lives for another 22 years, Stroud never knows for sure whether she’s ever again recognised as the loving daughter she remains. ‘It crucified my heart,’ she confides. She copes by charging out into the world, led by an inner wildness. There are Traveller caravans in Ireland and U.S. rodeos. She becomes a single mother of two in her 20s and follows a Cossack to a recovering war zone.

There is sex and drugs but there are also horses. Although it was riding that all but killed her mother, Stroud, who is a daredevil equestrian, cannot imagine her life without them. Their hooves become the heartbeat of a book suffused with healing nature.

This redemptive work will steal your heart and return it bruised, but emboldened.

The Wild Other Clover Stroud Hodder & Stoughton €28 ★★★★★