Unfenced Country

As Elspeth Huxley has said of him, Stephen Pern is an original. Though Unfenced Country is the latest in a long line of books about riding across Mongolia, Pern was the first Westerner to do so. His arrival in what today could well become one of the world's richest countries coincided with a time when it was one of the poorest, a crash victim struggling to drag itself free from the wreckage of the ex Soviet Union. The author spent sixteen months there, buying and selling some two dozen horses on which he covered over 3000 miles. Pern's photographs turn out to be as perceptive as his prose - an absolutely genuine book from a travel writer described as the funniest since Eric Newby's hike through the Hindu Kush.