The Horse Dancer was published by Hodder & Stoughton in 2009, before Me Before You made Moyes internationally famous. The novel connects two worlds that should not intersect: the classical dressage tradition (descended from the Spanish Riding School of Vienna, where horses perform movements of extraordinary precision and beauty) and a London council estate where a teenager and her grandfather maintain an impossible dream.
Sarah is fourteen, living on a housing estate with her grandfather Henri — a Frenchman who was once a student at Le Cadre Noir (the elite French national riding school in Saumur) and who has devoted his retirement to training Sarah in classical dressage. Their horse Boo (a former failed racehorse Henri has retrained) performs movements — the passage, the piaffe, the beginnings of haute école — that should not exist outside the great academies.
When Henri suffers a stroke, the fragile structure collapses: Social Services threatens to take Sarah into care, Boo is at risk of being sold, and the girl must find a way to continue her training and protect her horse without adult support. Natasha, a divorce lawyer whose own life is falling apart, becomes involved through circumstance — and the novel braids their stories together.
Moyes researched classical dressage extensively, and the riding sequences have genuine technical authority — the precision of the aids, the years of patient training required, the near-mystical communication between horse and rider at the highest levels.
Collecting The Horse Dancer
First edition (Hodder & Stoughton, London, 2009): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First UK edition in dust jacket: $10–$25
- Signed first edition: $20–$50