Our Horses in Egypt. Rosalind Belben

Philomena, fat and lazy when she is requisitioned from an English field at the start of the First World War, sails for Egypt with the territorial regiment, the Dorset Yeomanry. She serves faithfully, charging the dervishes in the Western Desert and enduring the privations of Allenbys great campaign in Palestine. She recovers from wounds to swelter through a summer in the Jordan Valley. She takes part in the triumphant advance on Damascus – only to be sold off in Cairo among the 22,000 horses left behind by the War Office after the Armistice.

By 1921, the forceful Griselda Romney, a war widow – in the author's Hound Music she was a child – has discovered that her old hunter, Philomena, could be still alive. With her six-year-old daughter, and of course Nanny, Mrs Romney sets out to Egypt, to find Philomena and to rescue her…

Our Horses in Egypt depicts the work of a troop-horse in the Army – and of exotic Cairo, in political unrest – as meticulously and exuberantly as Hound Music recreated the milieu of Edwardian fox-hunting.

From the Hardcover edition.

When England’s men enlisted in the First World War, they took their horses with them. A remarkable novel about a woman who sees heroic action in Egypt and Palestine and at the war’s end returns to Egypt to look for her horse.

From the Hardcover edition.

Rosalind Belben lives in Dorset and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Among her admired novels are Hound Music, Choosing Spectacles, Is Beauty Good and Dreaming of Dead People.

From the Hardcover edition.