The Horse and His Boy | C.S. Lewis | Harper Collins

I did a slight double take upon reading the title.  Shouldn't it have been "A Boy and His Horse"?
But the Narnia Chronicles isn't a straight-forward set of stories, so pivots and twists must be expected.

Chronologically the third story in the Narnia Chronicles, The Horse and His Boy was first published in 1954 as the fifth book in order of publication.

This story isn't about Peter, Susan, Edumund and Lucy as Kings and Queens of Narnia and their adventures, but is the "story of an adventure that happened in Nania and Calormen and the lands between, in the Golden Age when Peter was High King in Nanria and his brother and two sisters were Kings and Queens under him".  In summary, the story is about the escape of an Archenland prince from Calormen towards the north with two talking horses Bree and Hwin and a Calormen girl Aravis, who had escaped marriaged to the Grand Vizier of Carlomen.

Shasta, the Archenland prince, was brought up by a Calormen fisherman Arsheesh, who did not treat him well.  He was in fact Prince Cor, twin of Prince Corin, who had joined Queen Susan's entourage as guest of Prince Rabadash in Carlomen.

As with the previous two stories in the Narnia Chronicles, the christian theme is very strong in the Horse and His Boy, with Narnia as the promised land and Carlomen as the land of vanity, flowery prose and hidden agendas.

Certainly the Narnia Chronicles was written way before I was born, and perhaps many of the themes and allegories commonplace and acceptable then are perhaps not so easily comprehensible now.  Thus Shasta feeling a sense of relief that he could not feel any love for the fisherman he addressed as "father" made sense to him when he discovered that he had no blood ties to the dark-skinned Carlomen.  In today's world of cross-nationality adoption, perhaps that didn't seem reassuring or politically correct, at the very least.