In a memoir as vivid and unpredictable as any novel we follow Roger Garfitt on his journey from stable boy to jazz dancer, from Oxford dandy to Sixties drop-out. We see him on horseback with the Riding Master to the Kings of Portugal and in a beatnik pad with Redmond O'Hanlon. We watch as he is introduced to David Bowie and realises that the wrong one has come as the rock star. We follow him back to the Norfolk village where as a small child he had glimpsed the world through his grandfather's eyes and we are inside his head as he gradually cuts loose from the real world, eventually being committed to a locked ward in a mental hospital.

Written with a poet's gift for language, The Horseman's Word is an account of what it is like to feel the world too acutely, to love too obsessively, to go right to the very edge and, miraculously, survive.