In 2010, a novel about a run-down West Virginia racetrack won the National Book Award for Fiction.
Its publisher was so small it couldn’t print copies fast enough to meet the demand.
That’s the kind of story you won’t find on most lists of the top 10 horse racing books. Most stop at five or six titles. They skip publication years and awards, and one even gets the subtitle of the best-known book about Ruffian wrong.
We checked every book’s author, year, publisher, awards and film adaptations against publisher records, award histories and published reviews. Then we picked books that suit different kinds of readers.
How we picked:
- A real track record. Every book has a verified award, a major film adaptation, or a lasting place on racing reading lists.
- A mix of readers. We chose true stories, novels, a mystery and one pick for kids.
- Easy to enjoy. You don’t need to know a furlong from a fetlock to follow any of them.
We left out betting guides like Andrew Beyer’s speed-figure books. They’re useful at the window, but this list is for reading, not handicapping.
Quick picks:
- Best overall: Seabiscuit (#1)
- Best novel: Lord of Misrule (#3)
- Best for kids: The Black Stallion (#4)
- Best mystery: Whip Hand (#6)
Several of these books became movies. If you’d rather watch, see our ranking of the best horse racing movies.
Top 10 Horse Racing Books
1. Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand (2001): Best Overall
Laura Hillenbrand wrote much of this book without leaving her house.
She has chronic fatigue syndrome, which she developed at 19 while in college. She did interviews by phone and bought old newspapers so she could read them at home.
Author: Laura Hillenbrand | Published: 2001, Random House | Type: Nonfiction | Awards: William Hill Sports Book of the Year (2001), Book Sense Nonfiction Book of the Year, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award | Film: Seabiscuit (2003)
It tells the story of a small, knobby-kneed racehorse who became a national hero during the Great Depression. It also follows the three men behind him: owner Charles Howard, trainer Tom Smith and jockey Red Pollard.
The book grew out of a 1998 magazine article Hillenbrand wrote for American Heritage. That article won an Eclipse Award, racing’s top media honor.
According to her official site, the book spent 42 weeks at No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list across hardcover and paperback. The 2003 film earned seven Oscar nominations, including Best Picture.
Why is it #1? It reads like a novel, but every scene comes from the record. You get the races, the money, the injuries and the people, all in one book.
If you like her style, Hillenbrand’s second book, Unbroken (2010), is about a World War II survivor rather than a horse. It also became a film.
Best for: anyone. It’s the safest gift on this list.
Skip if: you only want the movie version. The book goes deeper into Pollard’s injuries and Smith’s methods than the film has time for.
2. Secretariat by William Nack (1975): Best Triple Crown Book
The 2010 Disney film Secretariat is largely based on this book. Its author was in the room for much of the real story.
William Nack covered Secretariat as a young Newsday reporter. He watched the horse’s workouts and races and talked with the people around him.
Author: William Nack | Published: 1975 (first titled Big Red of Meadow Stable), reissued 2002 as Secretariat: The Making of a Champion | Type: Nonfiction | Film: Secretariat (2010), with Nack as an adviser
The book covers Secretariat from his birth in Virginia through his 1973 Triple Crown, the first in 25 years. That run ended with a 31-length win in the Belmont Stakes.
Nack interviewed owner Penny Chenery (then Penny Tweedy), trainer Lucien Laurin, jockey Ron Turcotte and groom Eddie Sweat. He later wrote for Sports Illustrated from 1978 to 2001 and won seven Eclipse Awards for his writing.
That access is the reason it’s on this list. Plenty of Secretariat books retell the record. This one was reported from the barn, while the story was still happening.
Quick comparison with The Horse God Built (#10): read Nack first for the full story of the horse. Scanlan’s book works best as a second helping, focused on the groom.
If you’ve seen the movie, this book also shows you what the film changed. Our horse racing movies guide covers the big ones, like the missing stablemate Riva Ridge.
3. Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon (2010): Best Horse Racing Novel
No one expected this book to win.
Lord of Misrule came from McPherson & Company, a tiny independent press. It was Gordon’s third novel with the same small publisher. When it took the 2010 National Book Award for Fiction, the publisher didn’t have enough copies ready.
Author: Jaimy Gordon | Published: 2010, McPherson & Company | Type: Novel (294 pages) | Awards: National Book Award for Fiction (2010), finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, Tony Ryan Book Award for the year’s best horse racing book
The story is set around 1970 at Indian Mound Downs, a shabby track in West Virginia. A young trainer named Tommy Hansel brings four horses there with a plan. He’ll run them in cheap claiming races, cash big bets at long odds and leave before anyone catches on.
A claiming race is one where any horse can be bought out of the race for a set price. That rule is what puts Tommy’s plan at risk.
Nothing goes the way he hopes.
Gordon gives the grooms, gamblers and old hands their own voices. The talk is rough and full of track slang, and the people feel real.
The verdict: this is the most “literary” book on the list, and the one that best captures life at the bottom of the sport. Give it 30 pages to find its rhythm. Readers who want a quick, cheerful story should start with #8 instead.
4. The Black Stallion by Walter Farley (1941): Best for Kids and Young Readers
Walter Farley started writing this book as a teenager.
He began it while attending Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn and finished it as a student at Columbia. It came out in 1941 and has stayed in print for generations.
Author: Walter Farley | Published: 1941, Random House | Type: Children’s novel | Series: 20 numbered Black Stallion novels by Farley | Film: The Black Stallion (1979)
A boy named Alec Ramsay survives a shipwreck and washes up on a desert island with a wild black stallion. The two learn to trust each other. After they’re rescued, Alec and a retired trainer named Henry Dailey secretly train the horse.
Then they enter him in a match race against two champions.
It’s a simple, fast story with short chapters, which makes it a good fit for confident readers around ages 8 to 12. Some critics called the writing amateurish at the time, but children loved it, and that hasn’t changed.
The 1979 film is one of the few G-rated picks on our horse racing movies list, so the book and movie make a natural pair.
If you’re buying for a horse-mad kid, start here. If they get hooked, there are 19 more Farley sequels, plus easy-reader picture books in the same series for younger children.
5. Ruffian: Burning from the Start by Jane Schwartz (1991): Best Book About a Filly
Ruffian never trailed in a race.
She won her first 10 starts and led at every point of call in every race she ran.
Author: Jane Schwartz | Published: 1991 (paperback reissue 2002, Ballantine) | Type: Nonfiction
Then came July 6, 1975. Ruffian met that year’s Kentucky Derby winner, Foolish Pleasure, in a nationally televised match race at Belmont Park. She broke down with fractured bones in her right front leg, and she was put down early the next morning after surgery failed.
Schwartz tells the full story: her breeding, her brilliance, the people who loved her and the night it all ended. It also shows 1970s racing, when a filly taking on the best colts was front-page news.
Ruffian was buried in the Belmont Park infield with her nose pointed toward the finish line. In August 2023, her remains were moved to Claiborne Farm in Kentucky. She entered the Hall of Fame in 1976.
One tip when shopping: some sites list this book as “A Racetrack Romance.” That’s a different book about Ruffian, by William Nack. The Schwartz title is Burning from the Start.
Best for: readers who want a powerful, emotional true story.
Skip if: you’re buying for a young child. The ending is hard to read.
6. Whip Hand by Dick Francis (1979): Best Horse Racing Mystery
In 1956, Dick Francis was just yards from winning the Grand National for the Queen Mother when her horse, Devon Loch, collapsed on the run-in.
Six years later, he published his first thriller.
Author: Dick Francis | Published: 1979 | Type: Mystery novel | Awards: Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger (1979) and Edgar Award for Best Novel (1981)
Francis was a champion jump jockey in the 1953-54 season and won more than 350 races. He then wrote more than 40 bestselling mysteries set around racing, starting with Dead Cert in 1962.
He’s the only author to win the Edgar Award for Best Novel three times. Whip Hand is one of those winners, and it also took Britain’s Gold Dagger.
The hero is Sid Halley, a former champion jockey who became a private investigator after a fall cost him the use of his hand. Here, he digs into a string of promising horses that suddenly stop winning.
Francis knew how a stable works from the inside. The barns, the weighing room and the fear of a bad fall all ring true.
Since his death in 2010, his son Felix, who co-wrote four of the later books with him, has kept publishing racing thrillers under the Dick Francis name. So if you get hooked, there’s plenty more.
Best for: mystery fans and anyone who wants a quick, tense read.
Skip if: you need things in order. Halley first appears in Odds Against (1965), though Whip Hand reads fine on its own.
7. Laughing in the Hills by Bill Barich (1980): Best Racetrack Memoir
Some people go to the track for fun. Bill Barich went because his life was falling apart.
In the spring of 1978, he checked into a cheap motel in Albany, California, a few miles from Golden Gate Fields. He spent the season there, betting, watching and talking to everyone he met.
Author: Bill Barich | Published: 1980 | Type: Memoir | First appeared: serialized in The New Yorker
The book follows him through the stables, the grandstand and the betting windows. You meet trainers, grooms, jockeys and gamblers, most of them far from fame or money.
Underneath it all, he’s working through a hard personal stretch. The daily rhythm of the track, from morning workouts to the last race, gives each day a shape.
The New York Review of Books reviewed it in 1981, a rare spotlight for a book about a small-time track. It still turns up on racing fans’ shortlists more than 40 years later.
His publisher’s author bio says Sports Illustrated named it one of the 100 best sports books of all time.
Quick comparison with Lord of Misrule (#3): both take you to a small track far from the Triple Crown. Gordon’s book is invented and gritty. Barich’s is true, quieter and more personal.
Best for: readers who like memoirs, and anyone who has spent an afternoon at a local track and wondered about the people behind the rail.
8. Horse Heaven by Jane Smiley (2000): Best Big Novel for Horse Lovers
Jane Smiley won the Pulitzer Prize for A Thousand Acres. She used money from that novel to buy a small horse farm in California.
Horse Heaven is what came out of it.
Author: Jane Smiley | Published: 2000, Knopf | Type: Novel (about 576 pages) | Honors: Shortlisted for the 2001 Orange Prize for Fiction
It covers two years of American racing through a big cast of owners, trainers, jockeys, gamblers and grooms. The horses are full characters too, not just props for the people.
The book moves between farms, backstretches and racetracks across the country. Reviewers praised how closely Smiley observed the racing world, almost like an anthropologist, and how lovingly she wrote about the horses.
It’s long. But the chapters are short, and the tone is warm and often funny.
If you finish it and want more, Smiley followed it with a true story. A Year at the Races (2004, Knopf) covers her own life as a racehorse owner, following two of her young horses as they started their careers.
The verdict: pick this over Lord of Misrule (#3) if you want something lighter and more welcoming. It’s a great “long weekend” book for a horse lover, and a good fit for adults who grew up on The Black Stallion (#4).
9. Black Maestro by Joe Drape (2006): Best Forgotten History
The last Black jockey to win the Kentucky Derby did it in 1902.
His name was Jimmy Winkfield, and his story only gets stranger from there.
Author: Joe Drape | Published: 2006, William Morrow | Type: Nonfiction (biography)
Winkfield won the Derby in 1901 and 1902, making him one of only four jockeys ever to win it in back-to-back years. He finished second in 1903.
Then hostility and danger at American tracks pushed him out of the country.
He moved to Russia and became a star rider in Moscow, where he earned the nickname “The Black Maestro.” When the revolution came, he helped lead more than 250 thoroughbreds to safety in 1919. He later rebuilt his life in France.
Joe Drape, a longtime racing writer for the New York Times, tracks it all down. The book also shows how Black jockeys dominated early American racing, and how they were pushed out.
Kirkus Reviews praised its racing history but noted that Winkfield himself stays a little distant on the page.
Best for: history fans and anyone who thinks they already know the Derby.
Skip if: you want a fast-moving race story. This one is more of a sweeping life.
10. The Horse God Built by Lawrence Scanlan (2007): Best Secretariat Companion
Everyone knows Secretariat. Hardly anyone knows the man who brushed him, fed him and walked him every day.
That was Eddie “Shorty” Sweat, Secretariat’s groom.
Author: Lawrence Scanlan | Published: 2007, Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press | Type: Nonfiction
Scanlan tells Secretariat’s story through Sweat’s eyes. He traveled through Kentucky, South Carolina and Florida to find the people who knew him.
The result is part racing history and part tribute. It also shows what life was like for a Black groom in 1970s racing, doing the hardest work for the least credit.
NBC Select named it the best horse racing book overall in its 2025 Derby-season list. Publishers Weekly, on the other hand, found it rambling.
We land in the middle. It’s moving, but it works best once you know the main story.
It also fills a real gap. Grooms rarely get the spotlight in racing books, even though they spend more time with a champion than anyone else. This one puts a groom at the center from the first page.
If you loved Nack’s Secretariat (#2), read this next. Together, they give you the champion from the front office and from the stall.
Horse Racing Books: FAQs
What is the best horse racing book of all time?
Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand is the best horse racing book of all time for most readers. It won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year in 2001, was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, and became an Oscar-nominated film. For fiction, Jaimy Gordon’s Lord of Misrule won the 2010 National Book Award. See #1 and #3 above.
What is a good horse racing book for kids?
The Black Stallion by Walter Farley (1941) is the classic horse racing book for kids. It suits confident readers around ages 8 to 12, and it leads into 19 more books in the series. There are also easy-reader picture books in the series for younger kids. Pair it with the G-rated 1979 film.
Which Dick Francis book should I read first?
Start with Whip Hand (1979) if you want his best-reviewed book. It won both the Edgar Award and Britain’s Gold Dagger. If you’d rather read in order, begin with Odds Against (1965), which introduces jockey-turned-detective Sid Halley. Dead Cert (1962) was his first thriller. Most of his 40-plus novels stand alone, so you can start almost anywhere.
Was the Secretariat movie based on a book?
Yes. Disney’s Secretariat (2010) is largely based on William Nack’s 1975 book, first titled Big Red of Meadow Stable and now sold as Secretariat: The Making of a Champion. Nack covered the horse as a reporter and advised on the film. The movie adds some fictional scenes, so read the book for the real story.
What horse racing book should I read before the Kentucky Derby?
Read Black Maestro by Joe Drape for the Derby’s hidden history, including Jimmy Winkfield’s wins in 1901 and 1902. For Triple Crown drama, pick Nack’s Secretariat. If you only have time for one, Seabiscuit is the best all-round introduction to the sport and the people in it.
Top 10 Horse Racing Books: Conclusion
The best horse racing books bring you closer to the horses, jockeys and people who shaped the sport.
If you’re new to horse racing, start with Seabiscuit: An American Legend. Mystery lovers will enjoy Whip Hand, while The Black Stallion is a great choice for younger readers.
Whether you love racing history, thrilling novels or inspiring true stories, these ten books are worth adding to your reading list. Pick one that matches your interests and discover the stories behind the sport.
