Obreht is a masterful storyteller and this will stay with you long after you finish reading. There is so much historical detail and it is very atmospheric. I was unaware of the Camel Corp until reading this novel and of course I had to research it to know more.
Many thanks to Random House Publishing and to NetGalley for providing me with a galley in exchange for my honest opinion

I am not the right reader for this book. It has everything I thought I’d want to read because I love Arizona history and Old West tales. I could not connect with the writing or the characters and after several different attempts I just gave up. Most readers seem to love it, though. I received my copy from the publisher through NetGalley.

Another fantastic novel from such a young writer. It's a shame it takes her so long to publish, but I guess quality takes time. What a great book.

A beautiful narrative that intertwines two main characters trying to survive in the rough, drought ridden frontier of the West after the Civil War. Outlaws, family drama, ghosts and a brigade of camel soldiers all feature in this historical fiction novel.

First of all, I am so glad that i had the chance to read this early and review it. As the sophomore attempt, and much awaited at that, from Obreht, much was expected after the tremendous success of the debut novel. Inland was an interesting story told from two main perspectives, Nora Lark who is a homeowner in an Arizona town during a drought, awaiting her husband's water-seeking return. The alternate story is from the perspective of a pair of camel-riding outlaws. Both perspectives were fascinating and well researched. From a historical perspective, this was a work of art, telling the story from the various POVs that gave a firsthand view of what life would have been like for those who dared to try to live in the western, newly settled regions. The language used in each experience was so vivid and heartfelt that I could feel what the characters were feeling. This character driven story was poignant and compelling. In addition, Obreht adds the element of magical realism into the mix with characters talking to "the other dead" or Josie having these abilities to see and talk to the dead or see things about what was to be in the future. The slow, methodical pacing normally is not my favorite thing in a book but here it worked. It captured the growing thirst in Nora and her family as they waited for the return of her husband with the fresh water. This was a beautiful story and poignant novel that was a fantastic second book from a highly talented author.
Highly recommend.
#Inland #NetGalley #RandomHousePublishingGroup #RandomHouse

I wasn’t captivated by [book:The Tiger's Wife|8366402] so I almost wasn’t going to read this. But I kept reading so much about it that my interest was piqued, and I have to say that I was very captivated by this western story. There are two narratives which for most of the novel felt very disconnected, but when they did, it was an amazing thing. Lurie, a Middle Eastern immigrant is brought to Missouri by his father in 1856. When his father dies, Lurie is sold to the Coachman who picks up the dead and robs graves. He finds “brothers” in Donovan and Hobb Mattie and soon becomes an outlaw. Nora’s is the second narrative and it’s 1893 in Amargo, Arizona Territory, where homesteading is tough and living on this parched land during a drought can be brutal. It’s particularly hard for Nora, whose husband is missing and then her two sons, as she tries to keep her home, while caring for her young son Toby, who sees a beast and her husband’s niece who holds seances. Nora is so thirsty and the writing is so spectacular- so was I because I felt as if I was there .

There is death here and whether or not there are ghosts here is a question that the reader will have to reconcile for themselves. Is his lost “brother” Hobb a ghost or does Lurie just imagine Hobb’s “want” that makes him steal? Is Evelyn, Nora’s daughter who died as a baby and has grown beside Nora through the years, an apparition or is Nora’s imagining her as a way of dealing with her grief and the secret she holds? I know this might sound eerie, but for me it wasn’t. I can’t forget to mention, Lurie’s camel, Burke who is his best friend and confidante. Camels in the west? So of course, this had me searching to find out if this was true and it was. There was a United States Camel Corp, an army experiment to use camels as pack animals : https://armyhistory.org/the-u-s-armys-camel-corps-experiment/

It’s slow going at times and it took a while for the two narratives to connect, but it was worth the wait to get to that moment where a sip of water meant everything in this time of desolation and despair. Beautifully written and highly recommended. I won’t hesitate to read Tea Obreht’s next book.

I received an advanced copy of this book from Random House through NetGalley.

Tea Obreht’s “Inland” is an epic, sweeping western which follows two storylines—the entire life of the orphaned Lurie Mattie and his first-person account of his adventures (and misadventures) with the US Camel Corps, and a single day in the life of Nora Lark, whose newspaperman husband is overdue to return to their drought-stricken Arizona farm with much-needed water. Overlaying both narratives and tying them thematically together are a scrim of ghosts: the ones that Lurie sees everywhere around him, perhaps as a result of a childhood stint as a graverobber, and the ones Nora’s teenage ward, Josie, communicates with in seances—a claim that Nora disdains even as she herself converses with the ghost of her long-dead baby daughter, Evelyn.

Part of the fun of reading “Inland” is predicting how and when these two narratives will inevitably intersect, and although I figured that out fairly early on, the actual scene was powerful and totally unexpected. The writing is beautiful throughout, particularly the descriptions of the western landscapes through which Lurie rides, while the revelations—such as who Lurie is telling his story to and how baby Evelyn died—are handled well There is also a large cast of supporting characters threaded through both narratives, many of whom are interesting enough to carry their own books (including Nora’s enemy Merrion Crace, a cattleman who delivers a tour de force monologue late in the novel that encapsulates the whole idea of manifest destiny that drove so many pioneers west). This, in fact, was my one criticism of “Inland”: both narrative strands had so much potential for further development, but the seesawing structure of the book didn’t allow for either to be fleshed out as fully as I would have liked. Lurie’s story, and particularly his exploits with the historical US Camel Corps, was interesting and beautifully told, but it was Nora’s side of “Inland” that I was more interested in, and I wanted more than a day with her (even with flashbacks and one flash forward). Still, this very criticism—wanting more—speaks positively about “Inland,” and I’ll definitely be reading Obreht’s earlier book, “The Tiger’s Wife” and keeping an eye out for her future efforts.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishers for providing me with an ARC of this title in return for my honest review.

I LOVED The Tiger's Wife so I had very high hopes for "Inland" and it lived up in every way! I also really enjoyed the unique setting of the late 1800's midwest. It has a wonderful mythical vibe that will absolutely envelop you.

4 ★ Tea Obreht’s new book is fantastic and highly imaginative! Inland is historical fiction with a big dose of magical realism, that weaves together two narratives.
•One is of Nora Lark. A frontierswoman, wife and mother in Arizona, who is currently missing her husband who’d gone to town for water, and two eldest sons who left after a fight. Her youngest son insists he’s seen a terrible beast outside, while Nora seeks advice and is comforted by the ghost of their long-passed daughter, Evelyn. Nora’s story is told over the course of one day.
•The other story is of Middle Eastern immigrant Lurie Mattie who’s a wanted outlaw pursued by Marshall Berger.. and ghosts. He becomes a cameleer for the US Army Camel Corps and recounts his life from age 6 on up, to a camel he’s become inseparable with.

The narratives were sometimes hard to understand, but I’m so glad I stayed with it. I had that “ah-hah” moment a little under the halfway mark. From that point on I didn’t want to put it down. Inland is a surprising, wonderful and brilliant story. Well worth the effort!

Thanks to Random House, NetGalley and Tea Obreht for providing me with an ARC copy!

Thank you Random House and Netgalley for sharing this ARC with me. I had high hopes for this, but perhaps should have known better given my general dislike for western themed works and magical realism. This story of course has both and eventually those factors overcame my interest. I did not finish.

I received a free electronic copy of this novel from Netgalley, Tea Obreht, and Random House Publishing. Thank you all for sharing your hard work with me. I have read this novel of my own volition, and this review reflects my honest opinion of this work.

Inland is a historical novel that brings to mind an excellent fairy tale. There are times you will saunter to the next step in the story or face great leaps of motion and noise that take you by surprise. There are two stories - several Asian camel drovers and mounts come to the United States by ship. Some wise investors think they would be useful - profitable - to handle crossing the wild and wicked deserts on the way to California. By the time they arrive the men are on to some other fine scheme, there is no one there to meet the ship, so we have men and camels pretty much discarded in the southern port with no common language, no money, no idea where they were or where they needed to go. Camels, of course, would make wonderful freight haulers if a person could just portray that knowledge and if one knew how to get to the great desert areas of the west - the staked plains with ten or fifteen days between palatable water. And of course, camels were pretty frightening to residents of the south and western United States in that day and age. Most folks had not even seen a picture of a camel and those that had could not put the size of the beast into perspective. Most of these tales are told by the nicknamed 'hirsute Levantine' (though not a Turk) from Smyrna known as Misafir, as he talks to his camel Burke. And travel they do, across the south, across Texas Territory, and into Arizona, parts of Oklahoma, Maybe a little of Old Mexico and New Mexico.

Then we have the story of a family who chose to settle in the Territory of Arizona in the 1890s. The father Emmett runs a small newspaper in the town of Amargo, a few tents and small buildings nestled along Big Fork Creek. Mother Nora does her best to keep her family fed and clothed and handle the farm chores - they have sheep and sometimes chickens - and grow and preserve all she can in the garden when there is water in the creek. Lately, there hasn't been water anywhere in Arizona Territory, and Emmett is three days late bringing home a shipment of much-needed water. Still living at home are their sons - Rob and Dolan in their teens and baby Toby, 8 or 9. Emmitt's mother, Gramma, is confined to a wheelchair since a stroke years ago. Josie is a teen, an orphaned girl of Emmett's family, his ward and occult cousin. Harlan is the sheriff of Amargo, and Crace is the wealthy, heartless rancher stealing all the land and water.

Inland is a good story, filled with word pictures that will keep you smiling and a mystery of noble proportions. This is a book I am pleased to recommend to friends and family.

I approach a sophomore novel by a beloved author with excitement and trepidation. Téa Obrecht’s debut novel, “The Tiger’s Wife,” has an honored place on my shelf of novels that I recommend over and over again. Obrecht’s fable telling talents are back in action in “Inland,” an imaginative story that rambles across the arid landscape of the American West. Inland’s characters are rich and complicated. The first is a boy who arrives in America from the Levant, and rides with gangs of outlaws and explorers. His closest relationships are with his camel and the dead. The second is a frontier woman living an isolated life in a land with no water, and with few neighbors and only her family, including her dead daughter, as company.

Obrect’s language is beautiful and dream-like. As the reader moves between the two stories, the parallel metaphors and symbolism create a web of images that I will eagerly revisit with a second reading.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

This novel takes place in the 1890s in the Arizona Territory, portrayed here as a violent period in which the primary law is one of survival. Ironically, however, the imperatives of survival occupy not only the living, who struggle for livelihoods, love, and perhaps most of all, water. The dead are also characters in this book; they continue to haunt the spaces where they died, and make demands on those of the living who can see them. As many clergy like to point out during funerals, the dead live on to the extent we remember them and reflect their influence (for good or ill).

Thus some of the living watch whole armies of dead soldiers pass by from time to time, as well as the ghosts of children who died, “peering over the bluff, bright as falling stars.” All of them once came to the West to chase dreams or escape failures, and the landscape is filling up with their specters. The dead, one character observes, “watched us pass from their high-bluff caves, or from the basins where their unburied bones were scattered.”

That character - Lurie - explains:

“It’s not as cold as you would expect, the touch of the dead. The skin prickles like a dreaming limb. It’s not the strangeness of the feeling that terrifies you - it’s their want. It blows you open.”

The story slowly weaves together two plot strands told by quite different narrators. Lurie is an immigrant from the Balkans, variously identified as a Turk or a Levantine, or “a weird little monkey. ” He claims that choices he makes in his life are dictated not by his own will, but by the dead who surround him, and who find him a particularly receptive vessel for their wants and needs. Lurie was briefly a criminal (stealing in response to imperatives from a dead friend) until he joined up with the U.S. Camel Corps. This was an actual experiment by the U.S. Army in using camels as pack animals in the arid and inhospitable Southwestern United States.

It is important to know about camels since the one Lurie adopted, Burke, is also a character in the book. Hardly a soul in this book can fail to be impressed by them: “Their eyelids are thatched with the loveliest lashes God ever loomed. . . . And their great height lays all the horizon to view.”

Hadji Ali (known as “Hi Jolly”), who was first a victim of Lurie’s penchant for stealing, and then befriended him, brought Lurie into the Camel Corps. Jolly called Lurie “Misafir,” claiming to all who wanted to know (and lawmen persistently did want to know) that this was his true identity rather than that of the wanted man on so many posters.

While the experiences Lurie recounts take place over a long period of time, in alternate chapters we follow only a single day in the life of Nora Lark. Nora, a 37-year-old frontier wife, is struggling with the drought, the death of her 5-month-old daughter Evelyn, her very wayward son Toby, and deceitful ward Josie - “born to chicanery” - who would try the most stalwart person. Less immediately perhaps, Nora is trying to reconcile herself to the failed dreams of her life with her husband of twenty years, who is now missing along with her and Emmett’s two eldest sons, Rob and Dolan.

Emmett runs the local newspaper, and in his absence, Nora must deal with the controversies simmering over its coverage of the politics of the region. Nora judged herself as “a tough, opinionated, rangy, sweating mule of a thing,” having hardened to adapt to the rough circumstances of the West.

But Nora’s thirst, both physical and psychological, drowns out every other aspect of her life.

Both Nora and Lurie reflect upon all they have learned from their survival in the face of continual obstacles. And much of what they consider turns on the important role of deception.

Nora reflects that “the older she grew the more she came to recognize falsehood as the preservative that allowed the world to maintain its shape. . . . Her own knack for deceit surprised her. Lying was as easy as saying nothing. It struck her at some point that all life must necessarily feed on willful delusion.”

Lurie has similar observations: “The longer I Iive, the more I have come to understand that extraordinary people are eroded by their worries while the useless are carried ever forward by their delusions.”

And indeed, it is in this way that the magical realism of the book can be explained away. Are the dead really all around them, or is that just the way the characters come to grips with their passions and needs? One can’t even easily discern which characters are actually alive, or merely interacting with the living. Nora posits:

“Might the dead truly inhabit the world alongside the living: laughing, thriving, growing, and occupying themselves with the myriad mundanities of afterlife, invisible merely because the mechanism of seeing them had yet to be invented?”

Alternatively, might the illusions of the dead be a product of severe thirst, as when desert travelers hallucinate, convinced they are approaching an oasis?

Delusions and illusions lay over the story like the unending cloudless skies that leave those in this unforgiving landscape fatigued, undernourished, thirsty and given to desperate acts. And yet they carry on, the instinct for survival ultimately winning out, for most, over despair.

Evaluation: I’m not sure I liked the story much - it was dark, and a little too “out there” - perhaps surreal would be a better word - for my taste. But the writing by this author, who won the National Book Award finalist for her first novel, "The Tiger’s Wife," was impressive enough that I stuck with the book, and I was glad I did. It’s not a story one easily forgets.

Obreht’s poetic descriptions of the harsh environment create stunning contrasts, perhaps suggesting by this technique that even the bleakest landscape can be beautiful, depending on one’s perspective. I especially love Homeric epithets, which Obreht favors - her characters are “wave-rocked,” “sea-tossed,” with “sunflecked shoulders” and one of the most effectively pithy: “winter-stranded at a depot.” When one character looks out with fear into the forbidding night, yet she still observes, “On the far shore she could see familiar forms, the ragged lip of the mesa, above which the stars sat in their whorled millions.”

This story is startling in many ways, and might appeal to fans of Cormac McCarthy more than it did to me. This is not to say I didn’t recognize its literary merit, and would not hesitate to recommend it.

Unfortunately, this is going in the DNF pile. I am just not connecting with this at all. There are parts of this that I just marvel at - it is written so beautifully. The rest I'm left scratching my head. I never read the author's heralded debut, but I was anxious to read this as the summary sounded different and interesting. Plus, THAT COVER!!

Sadly, I'm far enough in and I can tell it's not going to get any better (based on my personal preference). It's far too slow (nothing wrong with that, just not my cup of tea at the moment), and while beautifully written, I am very, very bored. I am reminded of Lincoln In The Bardo, (that was also a DNF for me as well) and that isn't a bad comparison, but that book also just wasn't for me. The reviews seem to be all over the map on this, so I suggest you try it for yourself as your opinion my vary wildly from mine.

Thank you to Netgalley, Random House and Tea Obreht for the opportunity to read this and provide an honest review.

Review Date: 8/15/19
Publication Date: 8/13/19

This book took a long time to catch for me. I almost DNF'd it many times, but just kept reading. At 80% the two story lines still hadn't converged and I really wasn't enjoying it. Then suddenly everything changed and twisted in Nora's story and I couldn't read fast enough. The whole ending was beautiful and satisfying and so sad. If you can't make it that far, I totally understand but keep going if you can. The story of the woman homesteader is powerful and shattering. I will think of Nora for a long time.

Personally, while the camels were interesting, Lurie's story never really came alive for me.

It’s 1893, town of Amargo, Arizona Territory... Nora Lark has been expecting her husband for three days now since he went to the nearest water source to bring back the precious liquid they are living without, due to one of the harshest droughts in decades. Nora is, to a certain extent, unconcerned by the delay because her husband Emmet has taken longer in the past to return home from a trip. However, this time is different. Nora is having to contend with two growing sons acting out, her third, younger child’s overactive imagination, an ongoing dispute between neighbors, and Amargo and the adjacent town’s bitter fight for a council seat that may decide the fate of a railroad line.

I haven’t read Téa Obreht’s debut The Tiger’s Wife, though I have had it on my TBR almost since its release. However, upon recognizing her name, I decided to plunge into her newest effort and... what an adventure it was! Inland is a polished, deeply literary and ambitious novel—all the more remarkable because it is a sophomore work that shows an author already at the top of her writing prowess. The story develops over the course of a very fluid 24-hours in which readers are treated not only to the minutiae of hard, daily living in the Old West, but also to the backstories of a cast of characters that practically jump out of the page for being so brilliantly fleshed out. Us readers, thus, become witnesses to these characters’ inevitable fates, for secrets will come to light that may threaten the very fabric of their lives.

Inland is a mash-up of genres; a Western with a huge comedic component, especially in the first quarter of the novel. Afterwards, the humor becomes less frequent and a bit toned down, though not less successful, giving way to all the drama. Lawmen with tarnished pasts, outlaws on the run, cattle barons, newspaper writers barely scraping by, Mexicans, Native settlers, immigrants from all over, ghosts, camels, and a mythical beast, are the images of daily life in the American frontier, circa 1893, and who knew all these elements would come together, despite being seemingly familiar, to be so funny and fresh in the adept hands of Ms. Obreht.

Disclaimer: I received from the publisher a free e-galley of this book via Netgalley in exchange for my honest review.

Published by Random House on August 13, 2019

After The Tiger’s Wife, a novel that mixes reality with myth in a Balkan country, it might seem odd that Téa Obreht would write an American western. Yet westerns are all about myth and Obeht has given the genre a twist. The ghosts who haunt the main characters are in keeping with the dead who populate the stories told by characters in The Tiger’s Wife.

The living characters in Inland arrive at stark truths in the desolate lands through which they roam. One character comes “to understand that extraordinary people are eroded by their worries while the useless are carried ever forward by their delusions.” Another character believes that “God, in His infinite wisdom, made it so that to live, generally, is to wound another. And He made every man blind to his own weapons, and too short-living to do anything but guard jealously his own small, wasted way.”

Want is a theme explored through several characters, one of whom concludes that it is best to always be a little discontent, because “too much contentment is apt to make you think you can have more. And worse, make you wonder: when will it be taken away?” The two central characters, Nora and Lurie, are both struck by the “vast and immutable want everybody, dead or alive, carried with them all the time.” A related theme is the rootlessness of men who believe that if they keep moving, what they want will be found at the next destination, while rooted women stay behind to raise children and build a home.

The story is also founded on the timeless theme that those who hold power will do anything they can to retain it. They reveal secrets, they spread lies, they make and carry out threats. Speaking truth to power is nothing but a slogan when the powerful have the ability to destroy truth tellers.

All of these themes are given context in a story that moves around in time and place as it chronicles the tumultuous lives of two main characters. Nora moves from Iowa to the Arizona Territory to be with her husband, Emmett Lark, who has taken on unmanageable debt to acquire a newspaper in a small town. Nora lost a daughter and lives in constant fear that she will lose her sons. She carries guilt and keeps a secret about that death from all but one person, a man who is not her husband. By 1893, in the midst of a drought and a raging dispute between two newspapers, she fears she will lose Emmett, who left in search of water and has not returned, leaving her to be comforted by the sheriff for whom she has long felt a guilty affection.

Nora’s life is shaped by hardship but she keeps resentment at bay by finding purpose in hard work. In her mind, she talks with her dead daughter, who ages as if she were alive, giving Nora “a glimpse of how all of life would have unfolded had the girl survived.”

Living with Nora is a young woman named Josie, who claims to communicate with the dead. She is adored by Nora’s youngest son and might be the future wife of an older son, although Nora treats her with contempt. Josie and Nora’s youngest son are convinced not just that ghosts walk among them, but that a demonic beast is lurking in the woods. Nora is never quite certain whether Josie has a psychic gift or a wild imagination ­­­­­— the evidence could go either way.

The second central character is Lurie, whose story begins decades before Nora’s. Lurie was born in Herzegovina to a father who is always angered to be mistaken for a Turk. At the age of six, running for his life in his father’s company, Lurie travels to New York, where he is soon orphaned. His adventures growing up teach him to be a thief; one of his tutors is the ghost of a boy named Hobb Mattie. In concert with Hobb’s living brother during the mid-1850s, Lurie regularly appears on Wanted posters in the South, where rebellion against the law of the North is celebrated. His nemesis is Marshal John Berger. Fleeing from Berger, Lurie makes his way to the West with a caravan of camels, intended as pack animals for the infantry.

The conflict that drives the plot concerns a proposal to move the county seat from Amargo, where Emmett and Nora live, to a town that is lobbying to be connected to the railroad. The loser of that conflict is doomed to remain forever inland. For reasons Nora does not understand, Emmett refuses to take on the rival town, its newspaper, and its most powerful rancher. When Emmet fails to return home after going in search of water, the conflict takes on a new dimension and leads to a series of surprising revelations.

The plot is engrossing and the way the two stories tie together is completely unexpected. Inland might not be quite as astonishing as The Tiger’s Wife, but Obreht again gives her readers the gift of luminous prose and again conjures a plot that is unlike anything I have read before. At 33, she is a relatively young writer, but she has an old soul. Eight years passed between The Tiger’s Wife and Inland. Since quality should always trump quantity, I will gladly wait another eight years to read her next book.

RECOMMENDED

Didn't hate it. The writing, especially at the beginning of this book, was lyrical and at times compelling, but the storyline failed to grab my interest. Thank you, Netgalley, for this arc.

I received a copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The story follows two main characters - Lurie, a young man on the run from the law after falling in with a group of stagecoach robbers; Nora - a housewife in a new AZ homestead whose husband/two sons ran a printing press. The book switches between their two troubled lives as they struggle for survival on the frontier: Lurie fighting to etch out a survival while evading the Marshall and Nora trying to stretch out her scant supply of water until her husband's return. Both are haunted by ghosts, Lurie by a cast of ghosts from his pasts that make various demands of him, such as kleptomaniac compulsions. In contrast, Nora converses with the ghost of her dead daughter as she moves about the homestead.

I wanted desperately to like this book. I fell in love with Tiger's Wife (her debut novel) when it first came out. I think partially in terms of topics of interest (as a doctor, I connected more with The Tiger's Wife), I found it difficult to stay interested in the Western setting. I also struggled with switching between the two sets of characters - I found that I would become more interested in one set only to have the characters switch. I have never minded every chapter switching but switching between sections of chapters felt more difficult to read and I had to remind myself of the characters every time I switched.

I think that there was a lot that was interesting with the elements of a ghost story but ultimately I just couldn't push through. 2 star review for the gorgeous writing and interesting plot premise. Maybe I will try and come back at a later date but I found the setting and the POV switching to be too difficult to read.

Recommended if: you enjoy Western settings, ghost stories, good writing (and don't mind POV switching)

Thank you NetGalley for the opportunity to review this book.

[[DNF at 31%]]

WOW! I'm a fan of westerns but this is the first I've read told from a woman's perspective. It will stir up feelings like only an great book can. Tea Obreht has given us a world and it's characters that are so real you can see them in your mind. As the family struggles and circumstances build, you will try to guess where the story is going. You will be surprised. A very emotional story that reminds me of Cherokee America.