One of the highlights of my reading year so far has been Willy Vlautin’s novel The Free. The book draws together the stories of three characters – an Iraq War veteran who attempts to take his own life; a nurse at the hospital where he is treated; and the night caretaker at the group home where he has been living – with quiet attention and compassion, but never with sentimentality or pity. It’s excellent. It was not by chance that I read The Free. I have a pre-existing love affair with Vlautin’s work that began back in 2010 with my discovery of Lean on Pete, which of course led me back to his earlier novels, The Motel Life (2006) and Northline (2008), both of which I also love.

Lean on Pete opens with this line: ‘When I woke up that morning it was still pretty early.’ What a subtle hook – why say more when you can say just enough? – and so begins the gentle introduction to the novel’s narrator, Charley Thompson, a 15-year-old who has just relocated to Portland with his father. They’re a pair on the skids, always on the move as the father looks for work, shifting from trailer park to motel to run-down rental. Charley is grown before his time, a resourceful and thoughtful almost-man often left to his own devices; though he’s facing adult responsibilities before he should have to, he hasn’t become hardened by his circumstances. But he is longing for some stability and is willing to do what is required to get it.

In the early chapters Charley meets old Del, stuck in the car park of the local racetrack trying to fix a flat on his horse trailer. Charley helps change the tyre and eventually talks himself into a job, working for Del at his stables. It’s no dream job by any means, involving encounters with nags on their last legs and a variety of shifty characters, but it offers some money and purpose at least. It’s also how Charley meets Lean on Pete, a past-his-prime quarter horse, with whom he forms a bond so strong that the two soon set out together on a cross-country trek to find Charley’s aunt in Wyoming. I challenge anyone not to fall for these characters – both human and horse. This is writing that really gets under your skin. Lean on Pete satisfyingly covers a number of thematic bases: it is a coming-of-age story, a road trip, a tale of friendship and a search for belonging. It’s also a restrained work, and is all the more powerful for its temperance.

Vlautin belongs to a long tradition of understated North American writing that stretches back to Ernest Hemingway, with a focus on the small stories of ordinary people grounded in the kinds of locations that loom large in this antipodean’s American imaginings – Reno, Spokane, Boise. Populated by folk down on their luck or dealing with the fallout of bad decisions, Vlautin’s stories sympathetically explore how people who could be overcome by their circumstances find the will to make things work. His style is spare and evocative; you’ll think of other writers while you read – John Edward Williams, Carson McCullers, Raymond Carver, John Steinbeck, even S.E. Hinton – but these are whispers rather than loud announcements of homage, because Vlautin’s voice is unmistakably his own. His oeuvre is a total gem that had me at the first line.

Alison Huber