Gillian Mears

Gillian Mears was an Australian novelist and short-story writer acclaimed for fiction rooted in rural New South Wales. Foal’s Bread is a family saga set between the world wars during the demanding era of Australian show jumping. It follows gifted riders Noah Childs and Roley Nancarrow as love, competition, disability, and family hardship reshape their lives. Foal’s Bread first appeared from Allen & Unwin in 2011 after a long interval in Mears’s novel-writing career. The book received the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction, the ALS Gold Medal, and other major honors. Mears grew up riding and jumping horses, and her knowledge of the sport gives the novel’s dangerous high-jump contests physical precision. Her earlier books include The Mint Lawn, The Grass Sister, and collections of short fiction. Foal’s Bread joins that regional imagination with an unsentimental account of ambition and pain, using horses, landscape, and changing bodies to trace the fortunes of two connected families.