Horse Latitudes

It is 2021. Walter Cowley, a young botanist whose work takes him north-east of London to a vast cardboard city known as the Delta, stumbles upon Freyn, an ancient down-and-out scraping an existence among the chemical spills. Freyn, once the archetypal proper Englishman, is the only living relic of Roraima, a long forgotten British colonial outpost. During breaks in his lichen collecting, Walter listens as Freyn elaborates how, many decades earlier, he found himself drawn inexorably away from civilised life. While working in a respected shipping agency, he was commissioned to venture into the interior to retrieve two rare thoroughbred horses belonging to Luchenne, the mysterious recluse they would only whisper about at the Club. Freyn's story hinges on crucial events that took place deep in the tropical forest, and later aboard a becalmed ship where a single shocking act of violence cast him adrift on a sea of eternal doubt.
Horse Latitude, Jay Merrick's first novel, is a parable of lost love and innocence, the tale of a life unravelled by despair, then rewoven in a braid of beauty, hope and memory.