Machine Without Horses: A Novel - Hardcover

In this moving work of fiction, acclaimed author Helen Humphreys explores the imagined secret longings of a real private life

What is an ordinary life worth?

A seasoned writer stumbles across an obituary of a famous stranger and imagination is sparked. The brief words of memoriam describe a woman who was both extraordinary—eccentric, revered in her field, a renowned expert—but also utterly ordinary. How does a writer, intrigued by all that isn’t said, create a story? Capture an unknowable woman and all the secret passions, choices and compromises that make up a life?

In Machine Without Horses, Helen Humphreys explores the real life and the imagined internal life of the famous and famously private salmon-fly dresser, Megan Boyd, a craftswoman who worked for sixty years out of a bare-bones cottage in a small village in the north of Scotland. Was she happy? Who did she love? How did or didn’t she change as the world around her shifted? Humphreys, both present in the story and its architect, reveals in her inimitable style the complicated emotional landscape that can exist under even the most constant surface.

HELEN HUMPHREYS is an acclaimed and award-winning author of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Her work includes the novel > Machine Without Horses, The Evening Chorus > Coventry an > Afterimage > and her non-fiction include > The Ghost Orchard an > The Frozen Thames, as well as the memoir Nocturne. She has won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Toronto Book Award, and she has been a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Trillium Book Prize, the Lambda Literary Award and CBC Radio’s Canada Reads. The recipient of the Harbourfront Festival Prize for literary excellence, Helen Humphreys lives in Kingston, Ontario.