Inland
The New York Times bestseller from the award-winning author of The Tiger's Wife
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3.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
FEATURED ON BARACK OBAMA'S 2019 READING LIST
SHORTLISTED FOR THE SWANSEA UNIVERSITY DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE
'SPECTACULAR' Guardian
'A WONDER' Daily Mail
'SPARKLING' The Times
'EXQUISITE' Observer
'MAGNIFICENT' TLS
'EPIC' Entertainment Weekly
'A TRIUMPH' LitHub
'INFECTIOUS' Financial Times
'A MASTERPIECE' Sunday Express
Nora is an unflinching frontierswoman awaiting the return of the men in her life, biding her time with her youngest son - who is convinced that a mysterious beast is stalking the land around their home - and her husband's seventeen-year-old cousin, who communes with spirits.
Lurie is a former outlaw and a man haunted by ghosts. He sees lost souls who want something from him, and he finds reprieve from their longing in an unexpected relationship that inspires a momentous expedition across the West.
Mythical, lyrical, and sweeping in scope, Inland is grounded in true but little-known history. It showcases all of Téa Obreht's talents as a writer, as she subverts and reimagines the myths of the American West, making them entirely - and unforgettably - her own.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY: Guardian, Time, Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, The New York Public Library
'Should have been on the Booker longlist' Claire Lowdon, Sunday Times
'Magnificent... Brings to mind Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude or Toni Morrison's Beloved' Times Literary Supplement
'Exquisite ... The historical detail is immaculate, the landscape exquisitely drawn; the prose is hard, muscular, more convincingly Cormac McCarthy than McCarthy himself' Alex Preston, Observer
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The unrelenting harshness of existence in the unsettled American West sharply focuses what Obreht (The Tiger's Wife) refers to as "the uncertain and frightening textures of the world" in this mesmerizing historical novel spun from two primary narrative threads. In one, homesteader Nora Lark waits with her son and niece for the return of her newspaperman husband with a supply of badly needed water for their house in Amargo, in the Arizona Territory in 1893. In the other, outlaw Lurie Mattie flees a warrant for murder by taking refuge in the Camel Corps, an all-but-forgotten experiment in history to import camels as beasts of burden in the 19th-century American Southwest. As Nora's and Lurie's paths gradually converge, Obreht paints a colorful portrait of the Western landscape, populated by a rogue's gallery of memorable characters and saturated with spirits of the countless dead who attain a tangible presence, if only through the conversations they conduct in the minds of the characters whom they haunt. The novel's unforgettable finale, evocative and grimly symbolic, crystallizes its underlying themes of how inconsolable grief and unforgivable betrayal shape the circumstances that bind its characters to their fates. Obreht knocks it out of the park in her second novel.)
Customer Reviews
I see dead people
3.5stars
Author
American now, but born in Belgrade and grew up in Cyprus and Egypt. Fave among the literati (One of the 20 best American fiction writers under 40 according to the New Yorker, and on the National Book Foundation’s list of 5 Under 35). Her short fiction appears in all the groovy journals. Her debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife (2011), published when she was 26, was set in an unnamed Balkan country and spanned nearly a century. It received rave reviews. This is the follow-up.
Plot
There are two that run in parallel, both set in 19th century US. One is told from the POV of Lurie, a young immigrant from an unnamed Balkan country who keeps getting referred to as a Turk, which pisses him off because his countrymen fought against the Turks, unsuccessfully it must be said. He gets into petty larceny early on and gets internally “deported” to the western frontier mid-century, where he eventually becomes a camel handler. Lurie is haunted by ghosts and talks to his camel a lot, as you would.
The second narrative is from the POV of Nora, a frontierswoman trying to keep it together in the drought-ridden Arizona territory of the 1890s. Her husband and older son are absent. She has a younger son who lost the sight in one eye after falling off his horse onto his head, but sees monsters. Nora sees the ghost of her dead daughter Evelyn and talks to her a lot. Unsurprisingly given the amount of magic realism at large, the narratives come together at the end.
Prose
Ms Obreht can certainly write. Is she the new Gabriel Garcia Marquez? I’m not qualified to offer an opinion, except that I have to try very hard to make it through the books of both authors.
Bottom line
I liked this better than The Tiger’s Wife, which was completely beyond me.