The Tsar's Jockey: A Novel of Jimmy Winkfield

History waited beyond the gate.

Book Two of The Winkfield Trilogy.

In April 1904, a twenty-three-year-old jockey walks up a gangplank in New York harbor because there is no longer any work for him in the country where he was born. He is answering a letter from Warsaw. He does not speak a word of the language, and he has never seen snow like the snow he is going toward.

THE FAR PIER. Warsaw, then Moscow. An alphabet learned from scratch. A stable called Lazareff, and an owner willing to put a Black American on his best horses, because in Russia the only question anyone asks is whether the man can ride. The Emperor's Purse. The Warsaw Derby in June 1905. By December, he is Champion of Russia.

THE GOLDEN CIRCUIT. Moscow, St. Petersburg, Warsaw, Baden-Baden. They call him the Black Maestro. He wins the biggest races in the empire and is paid accordingly, and lives a life that would have been unimaginable in Kentucky: hotels, tailors, the National Hotel dining room, a prince's table. In Lexington, Sallie reads about it in letters that come less often, and then in newspapers. He marries Alexandra. In Moscow, they have a son, George, in 1913.

THE GATHERING WEATHER. Nobody in this book knows what is coming, which is what makes the last movement hard to read and impossible to put down. Small wrongnesses in Moscow in the summer of 1914. A boy at the rail. The July meeting at Hodynka. The last race. And then the guns.

He arrived with nothing and built a life worth more than the one he lost in Kentucky. He is about to lose it a second time, to a war and then a revolution.

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.

Follows The Last Derby. Concludes in The Long Way Home. Delivered as EPUB. No DRM.