She forgets to take the pill and doesn’t pack sanitary protection so she ends up bleeding on to the saddle.

She eats all her snacks when bored at start camp before the race begins, and for the same reason takes all her painkillers, antibiotics and anti-inflammatories out of their packaging and jumbles them together unrecognisably. She enters the race after the deadline, far too late to train or even assemble the right kit for racing such a huge distance on 25 Mongolian horses. The charm of Rough Magic is rather that of the narrator herself, an English ingénue who could come straight from Vita Sackville-West until you see glimpses of Shirley Jackson. It’s not the landscape, because Prior-Palmer resists romanticism (“little rock there again, little bush here again”), and if you’re trying to ride across the steppe as fast as possible, landscape is mostly an inconvenience. It’s not the quest narrative of the race, because we know from the beginning that our heroine wins. It’s not the writing, which veers between adolescent philosophising (“animals were our first teachers”) and moments of raw brilliance.

I am afraid of horses, bored by competitive sports and no more interested in Mongolia than a person of average curiosity should be, and yet I found Rough Magic strangely compelling. Lara Prior-Palmer was 19 when in 2013, to the surprise of all, she became the first woman to win the 1,000km Mongol Derby (the course of which is based on Genghis Khan’s 13th-century horse messenger system). T his is a memoir of a very young woman winning a very long horse race in Mongolia.

Rough magic lara prior palmer