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Rupert Isaacson talks to John Mitchinson

The Long Ride Home

Hay Festival 2014, 

Heart-breaking, uplifting and full of adventure, The Long Ride Home is the long-awaited sequel to the international bestseller The Horse Boy.

Rowan came back from the shamans in Mongolia a changed boy. The three most debilitating effects of his autism - his incontinence, his endless tantruming, and his inability to make friends - were gone.But a year almost to the day since Rowan's improvement he started regressing: the accidents and tantrums reappeared, terrifying his father Rupert. Something had to be done.Father and son embarked on a new quest, journeying from the bushmen of Namibia to the coastal rainforests of Queensland, Australia and finally to the Navajo reservations of the American southwest, where Rowan was transformed - they had begun the Long Ride Home.

 'It is probably only once in a critical lifetime that one will be moved almost to tears ... a triumph of the human spiritTelegraph (on The Horse Boy)