The Horse is a 2024 novel by American writer Willy Vlautin. Al, a singer-songwriter, has had a long career in the music business with periods working as a chef. After some highs and many terrible lows, he finds himself in his sixties living on the site of a remote, disused mine in Nevada, which he inherited from a member of his family. It’s the middle of winter and Al’s accommodation is a shack that used to be the ‘assayer’s office’. An assayer is an official who tests the purity and value of precious metals found in rock dug out of the mine. Al looks back at his life and acts as something of an assayer himself, looking at what happened to him, trying to find value amidst a great deal of rubbish. Meanwhile outside his shack there is an abandoned horse standing in the snow. Al, a humane sort of chap, tries to work out how to save the horse.

Finding gold is not easy, as shown by the occasions when Al mentions precious metals in his reminiscences. At one point he plays guitar in an outfit called Gold ‘n Silver, the worst band he was ever involved with. Gold ‘n Silver abandon him after he collapses on stage. The lead singer of another of his bands has a breakdown at a venue called Gold Dust West. Al smokes Old Gold cigarettes, which along with alcohol don’t do him any good. A casino venue in Carson City where Al fills in after a band loses their guitar player to a stabbing, is called the Nugget. All that glisters is clearly not gold.

Meanwhile Al is always trying to write songs based on his life experiences. He is good at this, and sometimes when things go really well, he writes something special, which feels like “a little bit of gold” – precious metal made out of the ordinary rock of his life.

Al struggles on, exploring his life story, and trying to save the horse. His efforts make for a fascinating and very readable meditation on what value means.

A book review is an assayer of sorts, and this assayer suggests that The Horse is a little nugget of the good stuff.