An interestingly wayward memoir, exploring […] the vibrant mixture of equine beauty and human ugliness to be found on the racetrack

A great father-son memoir, and a good book about horses, too

You needn’t love horses to find this idiosyncratic memoir a joy

This is desperately sad, life-affirming and just about wonderful. It is the book every father would want his son to write about him

As a memoir, an elegy and a piece of investigative journalism, it dazzles

Iridescent

Amply researched and gracefully told

Sullivan has found the transcendent in the house

Bracingly eccentric…Sullivan is a remarkable writer

It's a good, funny, moving book... [Sullivan] is unfailingly good company, always curious, often very funny

Sullivan knows how to craft a paragraph and tell a story

Reads as what it is: a great first book

This morning Blood Horses showed up in the post. It’s Sullivan’s first book, a memoir about his late sportswriter father as well as a study of equine racing and breeding and obsessing over. We’re only 30 pages in but we’re convinced Sullivan wins it by a length and then some. He’s the best thing to come out of the south since 2 Chainz

A truly fascinating and brilliantly written memoir recounting Sullivan’s relationship with his writer father but also a detailed examination of horse racing, the love of his father’s life, as well as an entire treatise on the relationship between man and horse

Blood Horses blends history, reportage and personal essay. The book is an excellent example of the mixed form that the critic Northrop Frye once called an “anatomy”. [Sullivan’s] enthusiasm rubs off

Brilliant, sometimes maddeningly discursive memoir… Sullivan writes beautifully. Blood Horses makes better reading than the smoothly finished works of less witty and accomplished writers

All the elegance and craft [Sullivan] displayed in [Pulphead] are present once again

Luminous, hard-to-characterise book... By the sheer fizzing excellence of his writing [Sullivan] carries off the difficult task he set himself triumphantly

It’s a daring approach combining memoir and reportage and, beneath it all, the autobiographical theme of his attempt to understand his father, but it works magnificently

The prose is relaxed, the choice of material telling; it is once more a delight to be in his company