"The Sport of Kings" by C.E.Morgan

    Until I revisited my other blog on Medium and looked at an entry I wrote on lynchings in the United States, I had forgotten that before going to Australia I had read a novel by C.E.Morgan called 'The Sport of Kings.'
    There is no doubt that this book is an extraordinary piece of work by an enormously talented writer. It is dedicated 'to the reader' and it surely demands of the reader a great deal of 'sticking with it' to get through the 500 or so pages. Indeed, one could say it is two or three novels in one.
    The author gallops through the fortunes of the generations of the Henry Forge family, the scion of a Kentucky dynasty of planters, slave-owners, and racehorse-breeders. But there is a lot more than this central narrative--we look at slavery, a slave who escapes to Ohio, creation myth, the selfish gene, oedipal struggle, the rock formations of the Ohio valley...and a lot more.
    And often the language is absurdly inflated. One critic chose the following passage to illustrate how over the top Morgan goes quite frequently:
 “After a long night of sleep in the underbelly of the earth, the armored sun rose and charged the horizon, pressing against the dark with long arms until night fell back, wounded and floundering, to earth’s antipodal edge.” 
    At one point in the text, the author seems to question her own methods:
“Is all this too purple, too florid? Is more too much – the world and the words? Do you prefer your tales lean, muscular, and dry, leached of excess and honed to a single, digestible point? Have I exceeded the bounds of the form, committed a literary sin?”
    But her own judgement is:
“There aren’t too many words; there aren’t enough words… we’re infants before the Ohio coursing its ancient way, the icy display of aurora borealis, and the redundancies of the night sky.”

I am not sure whether I recommend this book or not, but C.E. Morgan can surely write...

I had never heard of her, but she has published one earlier novel, "All The Living," which seems to have been well-praised.
In 2016 she won the Kirkus Prize