Inland
A Novel
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3.9 • 152 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A bracingly epic and imaginatively mythic journey across the American West” (Entertainment Weekly), from the celebrated author of The Tiger’s Wife and The Morningside
“Obreht’s simple but rich prose captures and luxuriates in the West’s beauty and sudden menace.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Time, The Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, Esquire, Real Simple, Good Housekeeping, Town & Country, The New York Public Library, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, BookPage
In the lawless, drought-ridden lands of the Arizona Territory in 1893, two extraordinary lives unfold. Nora is an unflinching frontierswoman awaiting the return of the men in her life—her husband, who has gone in search of water for the parched household, and her elder sons, who have vanished after an explosive argument. 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.
Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction
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
Magnificent
When I started reading this I wasn’t sure about it. Some people stopped reading and didn’t give it the chance it deserves. I stuck with it. And I’m glad I did. A beautifully written dissertation on life and its meaning. Not at all what it starts out to be, and ending with profound wisdom. The last third is simply riveting. I’ll be thinking about it for some time now. Read this. It’s magnificent.
Great book
Best book I read in 2019.
Inland
Beautifully written. A painter of strange and vivid pictures with words.