‘A lot of my friends have gotten killed. A lot of them have steel rods down their spines. One guy lost his leg.’ Violence, pain and disaster run throughout Kathryn Scanlan’s latest work of fiction, Kick the Latch. Narrated in a terse, documentary-like style, the novel is based on a series of interviews with a real-life racehorse trainer named Sonia. The result has all the exhilarating pace and tension of a high-stakes derby.

‘The backside is a little city,’ says Sonia, talking about the world that exists beneath the visible one of racetracks and betting punters. Despite the grandeur of some elements of horse racing, the ecosystem that sustains it is far from glamorous: ‘You’re around some really prominent people and some are just as common as old shoes.’ It can be a brutal place, too. She describes rotting corpses of horses lying with their legs ‘sticking straight up in the air’ and jockeys hiding ‘hotshot machines’ in their pants to give the horses electric shocks to make them run faster. If the lives of the horses are bad, so also are those of the people who look after them, brushing them, pulling their manes and rising at four in the morning to feed them. There is an unending sense of danger: ‘you get hit. I got kicked in the head.’ Unflinching descriptions of alcoholism, bullying and extreme poverty are all the more effective for their seeming lack of emotion.

An atmosphere of sexual menace pervades the book. Sonia describes how, early on in her career, when she was a teenager working on a racetrack for the first time, she woke up ‘with a man over me. He … put a gun to my head. I got raped.’ Many