Novel mixes horses, riders, and encroaching wealth

Novelist Aryn Kyle's book "The God of Animals" tells the story of a family scrambling to survive at a riding school in the Western desert.

A national best seller, it's now out in paperback.

She said she didn't intend for the story to be a novel. She wrote a short story about a 12-year-old girl called Alice Winston and her life at the horse barn.

Published in the Atlantic Monthly, it won a National Magazine Fiction Award. Then, she set it aside to work on other stories.

Kyle told Minnesota Public Radio's Euan Kerr that she returned to the story and began developing it as a novel after she moved back Grand Junction, Colo., where she grew up.

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