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The Ride of Her Life

Elizabeth Letts

Warwick’s presents
Elizabeth Letts
in conversation with Christina Baker Kline

The Ride of Her Life

Thursday, June 10, 2021 - 4:00pm PDT

The Ride of Her Life
buy the book

This is a free virtual event on Facebook Live.

On Thursday, June 10th at 4:00pm PDT Warwick's will host Elizabeth Letts as she discusses her new book, The Ride of Her Life: The True Story of a Woman, Her Horse, and Their Last-Chance Journey Across America, in conversation with Christina Baker Kline. Elizabeth Letts is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Eighty-Dollar Champion and The Perfect Horse, which won the 2017 PEN Center USA Literary Award for research nonfiction, as well as the novel Finding Dorothy. A lifelong horsewoman, she lives in Southern California and Northern Michigan.

In 1954, sixty-three-year-old Maine farmer Annie Wilkins embarked on an impossible journey. She had no money and no family, she had just lost her farm, and her doctor had given her only two years to live. But Annie wanted to see the Pacific Ocean before she died. She ignored her doctor’s advice to move into the county charity home. Instead, she bought a cast-off brown gelding named Tarzan, donned men’s dungarees, and headed south in mid-November, hoping to beat the snow. Annie had little idea what to expect beyond her rural crossroads; she didn’t even have a map. But she did have her ex-racehorse, her faithful mutt, and her own unfailing belief that Americans would treat a stranger with kindness.

Annie, Tarzan, and her dog, Depeche Toi, rode straight into a world transformed by the rapid construction of modern highways. Between 1954 and 1956, they pushed through blizzards, forded rivers, climbed mountains, and clung to the narrow shoulder as cars whipped by them at terrifying speeds. Annie rode more than four thousand miles, through America’s big cities and small towns. Along the way, she met ordinary people and celebrities—from Andrew Wyeth (who sketched Tarzan) to Art Linkletter and Groucho Marx. She received many offers—a permanent home at a riding stable in New Jersey, a job at a gas station in rural Kentucky, even a marriage proposal from a Wyoming rancher. In a decade when car ownership nearly tripled, when television’s influence was expanding fast, when homeowners began locking their doors, Annie and her four-footed companions inspired an outpouring of neighborliness in a rapidly changing world.

A #1 New York Times bestselling author of eight novels, including The Exiles, Orphan Train and A Piece of the World, Christina Baker Kline is published in 40 countries. Her novels have been awarded the New England Prize for Fiction, the Maine Literary Award, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Award, among other accolades, and have been chosen by hundreds of communities, universities and schools as “One Book, One Read” selections. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Book Review, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, Psychology Today, Poets & Writers, and Salon, among other places. Born in England and raised in the American South and Maine, she lives in New York City and on Mount Desert Island in Maine.

The Ride of Her Life: The True Story of a Woman, Her Horse, and Their Last-Chance Journey Across America By Elizabeth Letts Cover Image
$30.00
ISBN: 9780525619321
Availability: Usually Ships From Store in 3-5 Business Days
Published: Ballantine Books - June 1st, 2021

The Exiles: A Novel By Christina Baker Kline Cover Image
$16.99
ISBN: 9780062356338
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Mariner Books - July 6th, 2021