i was skeptical going in - what a departure from the author's previous book! - but I loved this subversion of the traditional literature of the "Old West".

Inland is the kind of novel that makes you stop and stare into space, if only to grasp the beauty of Obreht's ability to turn a phrase. People wanting to read something quickly may not appreciate the literary quality of the story's structure, but those who love a symbolic exploration of a deeper truth will find themselves lost in the pages.

I think at its core, this is a story about family and how death and other hardships shape its overall dynamic.

Throughout this book you'll be drawn into their lives, past and present, until both their worlds meet. It's a story too about family history.

Not a lot happens, while at the same time so very much happens. It's plodding, but thrilling. Unique, but familiar. Emotional in every way imaginable. Every character, every moment, is precisely placed. Nothing is superfluous. The writing is tremendous.

I keep thinking of this story, as a 'days in the life of'' sort of story. And I think that's the best way to look at it. You're getting a lot of history, with snapshots of the present. It's thrilling, but overall there isn't an overall story arc. It's an experience more than anything.

I enjoyed the heck out of it. I hope you check it out.

I'll post this same review to Amazon and Barnes&Noble and other retail sites.

I received this book for free from Netgalley. This did not influence my review.

Tea Obreht is a brilliant writer, as proved by her bestselling The Tiger’s Wife (which I have to admit I liked but did not love.)

Her newest book, Inland, is more up my alley and I did love it. Set in Arizona Territory in 1893, the book follows the fates of two very different people: Lurie, an orphaned ex-outlaw turned camel driver, and Nora, a frontier farmer trying to hold the family together while her husband searches for water during a drought. It’s clear the two disparate stories will eventually intersect, and part of the beauty of the story is piecing together all the individual parts until it becomes a narrative whole.

Lurie is a lonely figure, wandering the west, trying to outrun his past. He settles into whatever occupation he can find, finally finding peace with a group of cameleers who take him in. When his past catches up with him, he sets off again, this time taking along his camel, who has become his most faithful companion. Lurie’s other constant companions are ghosts. (And there are many of them haunting the barren West.) He can feel their wants and if he gets too close to them, he absorbs the yearning – not a healthy gift to have.

Nora is raising three boys on a hardscrabble farm; two are grown and one is still quite young. She’s devoted to them, yet detached. She’s walled herself off, having lost her firstborn, a daughter, many years before. The stated cause of death was sun-poisoning (sun-drowning) but, of course, the story behind that is complicated. Nora talks to her daughter’s ghost, who has not remained a baby but rather grown up as though a normal child, but one with a vaster perspective than that of a living child.

All the disasters that can beset a struggling frontier farming community have hit this one. The precipitating event is a severe drought that leaves Nora and her family desperate for water. Her husband, Emmett, who runs the local newspaper, has set off to find the delayed water delivery man. Her two eldest sons disappear, ostensibly gone looking for him. Alone with her youngest boy, her mother-in-law (incapacitated by a stroke), and her husband’s cousin, a somewhat batty young woman who undermines Nora’s practicality with an insistence that she can communicate with the dead. (Lots of that going on.)

It’s a gorgeous story, solemn without being depressing. Nora’s resilience in the face of almost unrelenting hardship manages to provide hope to a narrative that would otherwise be painfully bleak. The mix of dreamy otherworldliness with the stark realities of frontier life make for a complex, absorbing novel.

3.5 rounded up. This book is told in two narratives- Lurie, a middle eastern cameleer fugitive who sees spirits as he winds his way through the southwest and Nora, a homesteader in AZ territory raising a family in a drought with some political turmoil mixed in.

The first part of the book is a little disjointed. I had a hard time keeping track of characters as it bounced along and I found the first chapters confusing and a bit tedious.

The latter 2/3 of the book was absolutely awesome. The story telling and writing was phenomenal and I really admired the way the author wrote in supernatural elements as if it were a natural progression. The history was impeccable and fascinating and the ending is as satisfying as you could want from a story like this.

Tea Obreht''s writing is fluid as she presents the stories of Lurie, unintentional outlaw turned camel driver delivering water to parched communities of the American desert and Nora a woman in desperate need of water as she awaits the return of the men she loves.
This is a well told tale of homesteaders trying to tame the Arizona wilderness, the little known contribution of the United States Camel Corp. and Native Americans trying to understand and adapt to a different and changing country.
Obreht deftly intertwines tragedy and a bit of humor to bring the characters together and remind readers just what an extraordinary and often forgotten, history of the wild wild west.
Thank you, so much, NetGalley, the author and publisher for allowing me to read and review this e-ARC.

Obreht’s storytelling is at its finest in this magical and gritty tale of two unlikely heroes who inhabit entirely different worlds. Obreht moves back and forth between Nora, a frontierswoman possibly abandoned by her husband and adult sons trying to keep herself and young son alive during a drought and Lurie, an orphan, outlaw, and cameleer trying to stay a step ahead of the law and alive.

Both Nora and Lurie navigate their way through life aided by “ghosts.” For Nora, it’s the ghost of her dead daughter and for Lurie, it’s primarily the ghost of his adopted brother who died of typhoid. Nora’s ghost, Evelyn, acts as a sounding board for Nora, allowing her to test ideas and often tempering her wilder ideas. Lurie’s ghost, Hobb, goads him into theft by instilling an undeniable want that Lurie cannot resist.

While I kept expecting the two stories to come together sooner and in a stronger way, the way things turned out were really pretty perfect. This stands tall along with recent American West stories News of the World and Whiskey When We’re Dry. Recommended.

Inland proved to be a surprising reading experience for me in unexpected ways. I had heard positive words about the book before I began reading and was looking forward to it. Then I read the first section about the life and development of the young outlaw-to-be, Lurie Mattie. I disliked Lurie so much that I didn’t return to reading the book for a while after the chapter ended.

And then, a breath of fresh air, of sorts, as another story begins with the next chapter. In the desert of the Arizona territories we join a frontier family in the midst of a drought, with some chaos within the family itself. Father, Emmett, has not yet returned from what was to be a short trip for water. Nora and Emmett’s two older sons, Rob and Dolan, then seem to likewise disappear after an argument. Meanwhile young Toby and distant relative Josie are reporting having seen the Beast, whatever that is.

In long alternating chapters, Obreht tells the stories of the outlaw and Nora and, through them, tells a greater story of the settling of the West, the land of the Indian tribes and former Mexican territory, prospectors, farmers, ranchers, outlaws, lawmen, soldiers, the women who raised families or tried to. When Lurie’s story returned, I enjoyed his chapters and character.

I very much enjoyed Obreht’s prose. At times she writes simply and evocatively in describing the desert landscape. At other times, she renders versions of tall tales perfectly. She captures the complexity of her people as she gives them to us.

I do recommend this book. It is very much a Western so some may not want to read it for that reason alone. But it does capture a time in American history when life was uncertain in many areas on this continent. And it reveals a piece of our past.

A copy of this book was provided by the publisher through NetGalley in return for an honest review.

Popular author, this title will be popular too. I had trouble following the story but that's probably just me.

All of the reviews that I've seen of this book in the press make it sound amazing, so I was really looking forward to it. I'm not sure what I'm missing because I can't believe that I made it all the way to the end. The narrative moves so slowly that it seems like nothing is ever going to happen, and, above all, the point of the book is never going to become clear. The two storylines seem to have no relation to one another, and although they come together in the end, it's totally unsatisfying and the connection is only tenuous. I never got a sense of what story Obreht wanted to tell about this landscape or these characters. It just plodded along until the end. I feel like this book is a lost opportunity that just didn't work for me.

Inland is Tea Obreht's second novel. Most of you will remember that her first novel, The Tiger's Wife, received literary acclaim. I must admit that though there were elements of her first novel that I appreciated, it seemed that her attempt to meld folklore and reality into one story --- difficult for any author to achieve --- was a bit rocky and lacked cohesion. I was left feeling that even though the story was good, that one particular aspect was more distracting.

I wasn't far into Inland before one character was seeing the dead, another was claiming to communicate with them, and a third was conversing with a dead child. My initial impression was not hopeful, yet I was sufficiently engaged to keep reading. The pay-off was not far away; soon the story organically brought me to consider the possibility of the dead cohabitating with the living.

Please don't misunderstand; Inland is not a book just about the occult or mysticism. It is a modern-day Western that includes perspectives from all the early settlers of various backgrounds and ethnicities. One of the main characters, Nora, is a woman who has to deal with harsh daily life in the post-Civil War Arizona territory. The other main character, Lurie, is an outlaw Turk who evades the law while traveling the West on a camel (yes, there really were camels in the West after the Civil War). There are also Mexicans and Native Americans. Cowboys? A few, but this time they aren't necessarily the good guys.

How do these two characters end up in the same book? It doesn't seem likely, but Obreht pulls off this part of the storyline as well. Nora is a homestead housewife raising three children, plus her husband's niece, under extremely harsh conditions. Her husband's recent absence is complicating circumstances. As the novel continues, it becomes apparent that Nora has contentious relationships with just about everyone around her. A primary source of irritation: Josie, her husband's niece, who claims to communicate with the dead. Nora is skeptical of Josie's "talent" and refuses to allow her to hold seances in her home, while Nora herself has a running commentary with her dead daughter, Evelyn.

Lurie was orphaned as a young boy not long after arriving in America with his father. He remembers very little of his father and knows even less of his heritage. After meeting Jolly, a cameleer, some of the pieces of his past begin to fall into place. Lurie, however, is running from the law, and can't stay in one place for long. He absconds with his beloved camel and ventures across the West for decades, his storyline finally merging with Nora's near the end of the novel.

Inland provides us with a non-traditional perspective on life in the early American West that, despite incorporating a little fantasy, is probably a much more accurate depiction of history than we are accustomed to seeing. Obreht has developed her talent to also provide a compelling and innovative tale.

My thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishing for providing an advance copy in exchange for my unbiased review.

This memorable novel is my introduction to Tea Obreht, and I read it free and early, thanks to Net Galley and Random House. The combination of word smithery and whimsy creates the purest literary magic, and I recommend it to anyone that has a high vocabulary level and stamina. It is for sale now.

The tale takes place just after the American Civil War, and the narrative is divided between two characters, Lurie and Nora. Lurie begins his life in Arkansas; he is orphaned early and the man that takes him in is a grave robber that uses Lurie and other boys to assist him in his nightly plundering. Lurie grows up hard, fast, and mean; he wishes that he did not see and feel the dead, but he does, and most of all he senses their cravings. I am immediately drawn by his second person narrative as he relates his memories to someone named Burke. You don’t see many writers use the second person, and I am curious as to who Burke is. When I find out, I am even more fascinated.

Nora is one of the early (Caucasian) Western settlers, and here Obreht uses the third person omniscient. Nora is unlike any Western protagonist I have ever read, and it is delightful to see the way this author turns stereotypes and caricatures squarely upside down. Nora has her hands full, trying to care for the aged, wheelchair bound Gramma; fighting a political battle in the press that is run by her husband and sons, none of whom she has seen lately; and carrying on a running dialogue with the ghost of her daughter Evelyn, who died in infancy. To add insult to injury she is saddled with Josie, a relative Emmett insisted they must take in. Nora is carrying a heavy emotional load, but the slow revelation of the secrets that weigh her down and the way that these impact the decisions she makes and the way she solves problems is completely convincing. Whereas Lurie’s narrative is mostly about setting, Nora’s is about character. Both are rendered brilliantly.

I initially rated this novel 4.5 stars because of a few small areas where historical revisionism has crept in, but ultimately it is too fine a work to deny all five stars. I am reluctant to say more because the surprises start early, so to relate details that occur even twenty percent of the way in feels like a disservice both to the reader and the writer.

One feature that is present throughout both of the narratives is thirst, and it’s related so well that I found myself downing extra water in sympathy and thanking my lucky stars that I live in Seattle rather than somewhere dusty and drought-stricken. In fact, there are places in Nora’s narrative where she is busy with other tasks or discussions of an urgent nature and I find myself telling Nora to just go ahead and ask the person she’s talking to for a sip of water. Nora won’t do it because she is proud and self-reliant, and the fact that I am already talking to the character instead of the author tells you how convincing the story is.

The reader is also advised that it’s a violent, gritty tale, particularly in the beginning but in other places also, and it’s loaded with triggers. To tell it otherwise would be to deny history, but if you are a mealtime reader or avoiding harsh prose for other reasons, it’s worth knowing. But I also think that the whimsy is all the sweeter for it.

Perhaps one of every ten novels I read becomes that book, the one that I can’t stop talking about. My spouse understands that to pass through a room when I am reading it is to guarantee he will be hijacked, at least momentarily, because I am either going to paraphrase an interesting tidbit or read a particularly arresting passage out loud. This works well for me, though, because I find myself with more uninterrupted reading time. Inland is that sort of book. Highly recommended.

I have mixed emotions about this book!! The quality of the writing was so good, but it felt a bit drawn-out at times. The descriptions of living in Arizona in the late 1800s totally appealed to my senses, and it was easy to imagine what the characters were experiencing. The story switched between two narratives, and I found myself much more engrossed in Nora’s story than that of Lurie. I thought the chapters were a bit long, as I sometimes had a difficult time figuring out where the characters were in time when we switched narratives.

The mystical elements experienced by both characters was a very creative, if sometimes creepy, depiction of ghosts. Lurie blames his various misdeeds on the ‘wants’ of the dead people whom he believes have attached themselves to them. Nora is a mother of three busy sons but is kept company by her daughter who died in infancy, yet continues to age in her mother’s mind as if she were still alive.

The suffering endured in this book wasn’t glossed over but wasn’t written in an overly graphic way either, which I appreciated. When the two narratives are eventually woven together, it’s done in a way that’s surprising and refreshingly unpredictable. The ending was breathtaking and made the journey worthwhile. Thank you Netgalley and Random House for an ebook in exchange for an honest review.

This is the most recent B&N book club pick and with good reason. It was thoroughly enjoyable, and I will be sure to recommend it!

In the late 1800's the Arizona Territory is a vast, drought ridden land.
Lurie of the Mattie gang is a wanted man, on the run from the law. He is haunted by the ghosts he comes in contact with and if they touch him, he is infused with their desires. He joins a group of cameleers and becomes devoted to his camel companion Burke.
Nora is a frontier wife and mother. Waiting for her husband, who has gone off in search of water, to come home. Coping with the harsh, arid environment, and the constant thirst. She is haunted by her dead daughter Evelyn, conversing with her inside her head.
We follow their stories side by side, until they intersect in a most unusual way.
Western historical fiction with a touch of the supernatural.
This was a very slow starter for me. I didn't get invested in the story until over halfway through it.
Then I began to appreciate the characterizations and the mounting tension as it builds toward the conclusion.
My favorite part was learning about the US Army Camel Corps and their trials using camels.
Beautiful and expressive writing, I'm glad I kept with it.
Thank you to Random House Publishing Group for the e-ARC via NetGalley.
3,5 stars, rounded up to 4 stars.

Tea Obrecht’s parallel stories draw you in wondering where the connection is. Be patient, you will be rewarded at the end.

In 1856 Missouri, Lurie the young orphaned son of an immigrant is sold to the local grave digger. Together they bury the bodies,(after they rob them), of travelers that die on their journey and locals who are killed. It’s not surprising that he ends up in jail, meets a couple of brothers looking for easy money, and becomes a wanted outlaw.

In 1893 Arizona, Nora lives on the homestead she is desperate to hang onto, along with her family. Her husband Emmett struggles to run his business with the help of their two sons. Nora cares for her youngest son, who is convinced there is a monster nearby, and her children’s invalid grandmother. Emmett’s niece Josie lives with them also and runs seances attended by people convinced she speaks with the dead. Nora dismisses the idea thatJosie can communicate with the dead, meanwhile she has conversations with her own daughter Evelyn who died as a baby.

The writing is slow and deliberate. You can feel Nora’s thirst as you read about the agony of the drought they are enduring. You can imagine Lurie’s torment from the demons in his head. This book failed to keep me engaged. It was slow, and painfully unhappy.

Thank you to NetGalley and RandomHouse Publishing Group for this advanced reader copy.

To choose to write about the west is an arduous task. The Western as a genre covers everything from the high literary and mystical, such as Blood Meridian, to the page-turning gunslingers such as Long Arm series. Arizona itself is in love with its own mythology. One only needs to go to Tombstone where they can watch the OK Corral shootout happen the same time every day. It takes a special writer to accomplish this and Obreht has done so. She has captured that mythology, mystery, and the unknown of the west and placed into her characters. What stands unique is the use of a little known part of Arizona history, the US Camel Corps. Originally established around the Civil War, the efforts petered out quickly when they realized how ornery Camels can be and how fearful animals and folks can be of them. The focus on the Camel Corps adds another layer to the Arizona mythology (Hi Jolly and Red Ghost were real parts of the Arizona West). Her expertise in telling tales and creating her own legends and mythologies helps her mark her own place in the western genre. Much of the book uses very common Western efforts (surviving on your own with hostile animals, people, and land against you). It is the ending that makes the book shine. It is worth it to get to that beautiful finish.

I am writing this honest review in exchange for a copy of Inland thanks to The Random House Publishing Group. Inland is a novel that I could see in my mind as I read it. It appealed to multiple senses. I could feel the dust and dryness and Nora's thirst, I could see the landscape and the weathered, weary faces of the characters, I could hear the patronizing voices of the Doctor and Merrion Crace. At times, I got a bit lost in the details and backstories of characters who didn't appear to directly affect the plot. I started to skim over some of those parts thinking I just wanted to read the words that were obviously part of the core of the story. Then it occurred to me that there is more to a novel than just the main plot. There were offshoot stories about multiple character and not every detail related directly to the main plot. I realized that a fantastic writer develops characters as real people. Not every detail of someone's life is essential to the main experience of one's life. However, it is the rich details that make up person. The character development in Inland is was jolted me back into the story when I felt lost in too much information. There are questions that are left unanswered-or at least not definitively answered. The whereabouts of Nora's sons and husband is almost a character in itself. It drives the story and the way Nora deals with life without them. Sometimes that is frustrating to me in a novel, but not in this one. The intersection of the two main characters story lines is so interesting. I enjoyed the historical information that is woven into this novel. I also love a book that includes the haunted spirit world. I highly recommend Inland to anyone who loves a book that includes passages that make them reflect on their own lives, think about how they would handle the situations the characters are in or who enjoy words and how they feel when you say them out loud. I highlighted a passage that read "I began to wish that I could pour our memories into the water we carried, so that anyone drinking might see how it had been." I think that is exactly how I felt after I finished Inland-like I drank the water that showed me how it had been for the characters. The ending of this book is satisfying in a way I've never experienced before. I am fascinated by Ms. Obreht's style of writing and wonder at how authors like her can create the worlds and characters that they do.
My review on Goodreads posted 9/4/19.

Obreht is undoubtedly a beautiful writer, but I just could not figure out what was going on in this book. It’s written from two perspectives, both of which reveal more through time. Just when I felt like I was starting to get my bearings in the story it would switch to a totally different character and setting in a way I just couldn’t follow. I liked The Tiger’s Wife, and I’ll certainly read future books by Obreht, but this was was just not my favorite.

This book is well-written, but it didn't grab me. I loved her previous book, but this book took a long time to get into and I really wasn't sure I wanted to finish. The fine writing is what kept me going. I found Nora's story more compelling.