The Long Way Home: A Novel of Jimmy Winkfield

Book Three of The Winkfield Trilogy, and the volume where a man loses everything twice and keeps walking.

THE GUNS. Moscow, winter 1914. Racing does not stop when a war starts; it thins. Horses are requisitioned as remounts. The post stops allowing certain letters. Bread becomes a subject rather than a fact. And then February 1917 arrives, and one week changes the country under his feet.

THE ROAD. This is the part of Winkfield's life that sounds invented and is not. In 1919, with Odessa about to fall, he helps drive a herd of more than two hundred thoroughbreds roughly eleven hundred miles across the Russian steppe to safety in Poland. It takes months. They cross the Dniester. Typhus moves through Bessarabia. Horses and men do not all arrive.

He reaches Warsaw again in the winter of 1920 with what he is carrying and nothing else. Everything he built across sixteen years in Russia is gone.

THE LONG WAY HOME. France, and a training yard at Maisons-Laffitte outside Paris where he builds a third life and this one holds for twenty years. He trains. He wins. He raises a family. Then the Germans come in 1940, the yard is occupied, and he crosses the ocean a second time, ending up in Aiken, South Carolina, in a country that still has nothing for him.

After the war he goes back to France and rebuilds the yard a second time. He is in his sixties. Then, in May 1961, an invitation arrives: Sports Illustrated is holding a banquet in Louisville, and would he come.

He goes. He is eighty years old. He has won the Kentucky Derby twice and has not been back in nearly sixty years. What happens at the door of that banquet is the reason this trilogy exists, and it is not what the invitation promised.

The last chapter is a lane at Maisons-Laffitte in June, and an old man walking it.

Thirty chapters in three movements, each anchored to a place and a year, with a note on the record at the front setting out what is documented and what is reconstructed.

Concludes The Winkfield Trilogy, after The Last Derby and The Tsar's Jockey. Delivered as EPUB. No DRM.