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'My body, suddenly, carries two stories of loss. I'm heavy with them, made cumbersome and slow. One is easy for people to recognise. My mother died of cancer. I watched her age 25 years in eight weeksa My other story marks me as different. It is more silent and more savage, it is not pure and no one knows how to approach it. Somewhere I lost my husband. He slipped away from me in a whirl of fear and confusion.' When Maggie's vibrant young husband, father to a five-year-old daughter and an unborn son, walks away from everyone he loves and kills himself, Maggie is left widowed and due to give birth three months later to their second child. Then her beloved mother, backbone of the family, mother to three children, grandmother to two, dies suddenly of aggressive cancer. In two short years, Maggie's life has shattered. After a year, she gives up trying to juggle single motherhood and the demands of an academic career and returns with her children to her mother's family farm in central weste.

Every November, the Scorpio Races are run beneath the chalk cliffs of Skarmouth. Sean Kendrick is the only man on the island capable of taming the beasts. Puck enters the races to save her family, but he horse she rides is an ordinary little mare. They both enter the Races hoping to change their lives. But first they'll have to survive.

A graphic novel memoir depicting the author's teenage experiences at summer camp where she fell in love with an older girl.