A Horse Named Sorrow

By: Trebor Healey

Narrated by: Dylan McCormick

Selection, Over the Rainbow Project, GLBT Round Table of the American Library Association

Finalist, General Fiction, Lambda Literary Awards

Winner, Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction, Publishing Triangle

Winner, Duggins outstanding Mid-Career novelist Award

Award-winning novelist Trebor Healey depicts San Francisco in the 1980s and ’90s in poetic prose that is both ribald and poignant, and a crossing into the American West that is dreamy, mythic, and visionary.

When troubled twenty-one-year-old Seamus Blake meets the strong and self-possessed Jimmy (just arrived in San Francisco by bicycle from his hometown of Buffalo, New York), he feels his life may finally be taking a turn for the better. But the ensuing romance proves short-lived as Jimmy's HIV leads to a series of wrenching AIDS-related illnesses amid the pairs' growing activism with ACT UP.

Crushed by Jimmy's eventual death, the grieving Seamus is obliged to keep a promise to Jimmy: “Take me back the way I came.” And so Seamus sets out by bicycle on a picaresque journey with his lost love's ashes, hoping to bring them back to Buffalo. At once a contemporary look at American grief through the eyes of one young man at a crucial moment of his life, A Horse Named Sorrow is also evocative of the Orpheus myth, with the great American western landscape as a kind of vast underworld, where our hapless protagonist meets truck drivers, waitresses, college kids, farmers, ranchers, Marines, and other travelers—each one giving him a new perspective on his own life and on Jimmy’s death.

When he meets and becomes involved with a young Native American man journeying back to Pine Ridge, whose mother has recently died, Seamus’s grief and his story become universal and redemptive.

©2013 Trebor Healey (P)2024 Trebor Healey