The one thing you can predict about a new Meg Rosoff novel is its unpredictability. How I Live Now was set in the near future, and Just in Case and What I Was in the present, and all three featured very different main characters and plots. The Bride's Farewell is her first historical novel, set in the 19th century, and has been widely compared with Hardy.

Pell rises early, leaving her wedding dress spread out on a chair, saddles her horse Jack and slips away from the house. She's decided she can't possibly marry Birdie, the smith's son, so she's running away. But her plans are complicated by Bean, her mute little brother, who insists, silently, on accompanying her.

There was a time when Pell was sympathetic to the idea of marrying Birdie - until he blew it by offering her a "house full of children". She's seen what it's done to her own mother, bearing her brood to a drunken and violent husband. "Toil and hardship and a clamour of mouths to feed? Not now, Pell thought. Not ever."

Pell has no real plan beyond going to the Salisbury horse fair and finding work. She certainly doesn't anticipate losing Bean and her horse. The central section of the book has her and the reader close to despair as she searches for them both. In the course of her wanderings she again comes across Dogman, a hunter and trapper she met in Salisbury, into whose cowshed she moves for the winter with no company apart from a dog she has acquired from a Gypsy family.

Dogman is taciturn, though not "a Mr Darcy type", as the press release fatuously claims. The hunter's strong, silent virtues come to the fore when Pell is assaulted by a baker's brother, whose marriage proposal she turns down. She has a broken arm and is covered with bruises when Dogman finds her slumped and feverish in the straw of the cowshed. "He said not a word but gathered her up in his arms ... and took her to his cottage." That would be the Hardy touch, then - except that two days and two pages later, he's more like a DH Lawrence character, and "from that day on they lived as man and wife". Although I am not entirely convinced by the silent lover - Pell never knows his real name and apparently never asks - I am completely won over by the other love story in this book. That is Pell's passion for horses, which surely mirrors the writer's own.

Pell finds work as a groom, after Dogman has gone off to visit a suddenly revealed wife and child, and it is in the stables that she finds a kind of happiness. Her understanding of and need to be around horses is Pell's defining characteristic. By then she has rescued two of her sisters from the workhouse, after finding out that their parents have died in a mysterious fire, and has become the family's breadwinner.

But there is still the fate of Bean and Jack to be resolved. And this is where Rosoff comes into her incomparable own: each has found his own place in the world, the way Pell must. The Gypsy woman holds the key to a large part of the story in a way Pell never recognises and is implacable in her determination to avenge an old wrong, which we are privileged to know about.

The title is perhaps misleading; in spite of many partings and sorrows, this is a book in which the heroine rises to greet what life throws at her. Not Hardy. Pure Rosoff.

 Mary Hoffman's novel Troubadour is published by Bloomsbury. To order The Bride's Farewell for £9.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop