Taurus

'I can see myself - I can see the large black shape planted on short legs, the thick shoulders and neck and the huge broad head with horns pointing skyward. I swish my tail and snort and stamp and I can see a bull, doing these things' Under a blazing sun a black bull paces back and forth. His skin flickers in the heat; he is a mass of power and strength, muscles tightly coiled, latent aggression coursing in his blood. His days are spent corralled between a barn and a paddock, contained and impatient, tended from a distance by a young boy. He senses in him a premonition of death; he can see a man lifted on the cruel points of his horns, trampled under his hooves. In vivid writing we are with the bull, inside his head; observing the parched landscape, the struggling weeds and night creatures. We are also drawn in to his mind, to the impulses and memories that urge him on, often with terrible consequences. In the dust and the lethargy of the farm, two acts of violence are to lead him to his fate. He is sent away, where his brutality is finally given free rein inside a booming arena. Figures dart in his vision, swirls of colour and movement drawing him in to charge again and again, his horns probing beneath the fabric for flesh, the lust for impact ever present. Beset by rage, the bull enters into an extraordinary battle, one the reader is with entirely, in the rush, heat and blood of the corrida. Following on from his acclaimed debut novel The Wolf, Joseph Smith returns to once again transport the reader wholly into the mind of an animal - the violence of the bull-ring vividly recreated from a new perspective, in writing both incandescent and authentic.