Soft Bite

Australia’s Yarra Valley is postcard wine country to most of the world. To Cheryl Welch it has always been horse country in all its beauty and brutality – thoroughbreds worked before dawn, the smallest signs of fear, pain and promise read in the flick of an ear.

One morning, at the track, the news of a terrible accident arrives.

In the days that follow, Cheryl retreats deeper into the only world that still makes sense to her. Her youngest daughter, meanwhile, drifts towards nights that don’t end well and men who don’t ask her age.

And in the yard, a starved filly with shattered confidence – discarded by the racing industry that broke her – offers Cheryl something she desperately needs: hope.

Lyrical, visceral and beautifully rendered, Soft Bite is a novel about mothers and daughters, desire and damage, and the flimsy barrier between care and control. From the frost and sawdust of rural trackwork to the gaudy wealth and worn-in misogyny of the inner-city racing scene, it moves through tenderness and casual violence with sensory precision, asking what we owe the creatures – and the people – we claim to love, and how far grief can carry us before it tips into something else.

‘Soft Bite is a story that the country needs to hear. By delving into the murky morals of the Australian racing industry, Bishop is shining a light on areas of a faux glamorous world that many of us are willing to turn a blind eye to. Her empathy, imagination and artistic vision are all perfectly suited to this story.’
ROBBIE ARNOTT