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 bull paces back and forth, his skin flickering in the heat. Weighed down by his own mass he is corralled between the repetition of barn and paddock, his senses dulled by the dust and lethargy of the farm.A boy tends him from a distance, and in this boy he senses the possibility of a different path: of swirls of colour and movement, of his own power and strength - a premonition of what he might create through violence.

In vivid writing we are with the bull as he emerges from dormancy, inside his head, observing his parched surrounds and the things and people that inhabit it. We are also drawn in to his mind, his past, and to the impulses and memories that propel him, that create in him the conflict between power and the consequences of its use: a battle that will inexorably lead the bull to his fate, and to a greater and deadly battle within 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, exploring the violence of the bull-ring from a new perspective, in writing both immediate and incandescent.

Taurus is a second novel of extraordinary power and poise, the work of a unique voice within contemporary fiction.