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Téa Obreht

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Inland: A Novel Kindle Edition

by Téa Obreht (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.0 1,643 ratings

Editors' pick Best Literature & Fiction

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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

From the Publisher

Praise for INLAND

WARNING: California’s Proposition 65

Editorial Reviews

Review

“What Obreht pulls off here is pure poetry. It doesn’t feel written so much as extracted from the mind in its purest, clearest, truest form.”—Entertainment Weekly (Grade: A)

“As it should be, the landscape of the West itself is a character, thrillingly rendered throughout. . . . Here, Obreht’s simple but rich prose captures and luxuriates in the West’s beauty and sudden menace. Remarkable in a novel with such a sprawling cast, Obreht also has a poetic touch for writing intricate and precise character descriptions.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)

“Beautifully wrought.”—Vanity Fair

“Inland is a classic story, told in a classic way—and yet it feels wholly and unmistakably new. . . . At once a new Western myth and a far realer story than many we have previously received—and that’s even with all the ghosts.”—NPR

“With Inland, Obreht makes a renewed case for the sustained, international appeal of the American West, based on a set of myths that have been continually shaped and refracted through outside lenses. . . . Discovering the particular genre conventions that Obreht has chosen to transfigure or to uphold soon becomes central to the novel’s propulsive appeal.”—The New Yorker

“It’s a voyage of hilarious and harrowing adventures, told in the irresistible voice of a restless, superstitious man determined to live right but tormented by his past. At times, it feels as though Obreht has managed to track down Huck Finn years after he lit out for the Territory and found him riding a camel. . . . The unsettling haze between fact and fantasy in Inland is not just a literary effect of Obreht’s gorgeous prose; it’s an uncanny representation of the indeterminate nature of life in this place of brutal geography.”—Ron Charles, The Washington Post

“Propulsive . . . Obreht has swapped the tumultuous history of the former Yugoslavia for that of the American frontier. What she retains, in addition to infectious storytelling and a split, double narrative, is the strong sense of superstition which pervades the earlier fiction; a form of magic realism is at work here, which does not detract from the harshly explicit truths transmitted about the nature—and the price—of survival.”—Financial Times

“Exquisite . . . The historical detail is immaculate, the landscape exquisitely drawn; the prose is hard, muscular, more convincingly Cormac McCarthy than McCarthy himself.”—The Guardian

“In a moment where the book world fetishizes self-examination and minute, sentence-level showiness, it is not only a relief but a privilege to see Obreht shoot the moon with this sprawlingly ambitious and fully imagined tale.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“Rivers of blood and ink have been spilled mythologizing the American Southwest, but rarely if ever with the sort of giddy beauty Téa Obreht brings to the page in Inland. . . . [She] displays dazzling dexterity and wit with the English language, transporting the reader to a fantastical late nineteenth century that borders on outright fantasy, where descriptions wax decadent and ghosts are treated as a matter of fact.”—USA Today

"Téa Obreht’s M.O. is clear: She’s determined to unsettle our most familiar, cliché-soaked genres. . . . Inland can feel like Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian turned inside out: contemplative rather than rollicking, ghostly rather than blood-soaked.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune

About the Author

Téa Obreht’s debut novel, The Tiger's Wife, won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction and was an international bestseller. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, and Zoetrope: All-Story, among many others. Originally from the former Yugoslavia, she now lives in New York with her husband and teaches at Hunter College.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Missouri

When those men rode down to the fording place last night, I thought us done for. Even you must realize how close they came: their smell, the song of their bridles, the whites of their horses’ eyes. True to form—blind though you are, and with that shot still irretrievable in your thigh—you made to stand and meet them. Perhaps I should have let you. It might have averted what happened tonight, and the girl would be unharmed. But how could I have known? I was unready, disbelieving of our fate, and in the end could only watch them cross and ride up the wash away from us in the moonlight. And wasn’t I right to wait—for habit if nothing else? I knew you had flight in you yet. You still do; as do I, as I have all my life—since long before we fell in together, when I first came round to myself, six years old and already on the run, wave-rocked, with my father in the bunk beside me and all around the hiss of water against the hull. It was my father running back then, though from what I never knew. He was thin, I think. Young, perhaps. A blacksmith perhaps, or some other hard-laboring man who never caught more rest than he did that swaying month when night and day went undiffered, and there was nothing but the creak of rope and pulley somewhere above us in the dark. He called me sìne, and some other name I’ve struggled lifelong to recall. Of our crossing I remember mostly foam veins and the smell of salt. And the dead, of course, outlaid in their white shrouds side by side along the stern.

We found lodging near the harbor. Our room overlooked laundry lines that crosshatched from window to window until they vanished in the steam of the washhouse below. We shared a mattress and turned our backs to the madman across the room and pretended he wasn’t a bit further gone each day than the last. There was always somebody shrieking in the halls. Somebody caught between worlds. I lay on my side and held the lapel of my father’s coat and felt the lice roving through my hair.

I never met a man so deep-sleeping as my father. Dockwork will do that, I reckon. Every day would find him straining under some crate or hump of rope that made him look an ant. Afterwards, he’d take my hand and let the river of disembarking bodies carry us away from the quays, up the thoroughfare to where the steel scaffolds were rising. They were a marvel to him, curious as he was about the world’s workings. He had a long memory, a constant toothache, and an abiding hatred of Turks that tended to flare up when he took tea with likeminded men. But a funny thing would happen if ever some Serb or Magyar started in about the iron fist of Stambul: my father, so fixed in his enmity, would grow suddenly tearful. Well, efendi, he’d say. Are you better off now? Better off here? Ali-Pasha Rizvanbegović was a tyrant—but far from the worst! At least our land was beautiful. At least our homes were our own. Then would follow wistful reminiscences of his boyhood village: a tumble of stone houses split by a river so green he had no word for it in his new tongue, and had to say it in the old one, thus trapping it forever as a secret between the two of us. What I’d give to remember that word. I could not think why he would leave such a town for this reeking harbor, which turned out to be the kind of place where praying palms-up and a name like Hadziosman Djurić got him mistaken for a Turk so often he disowned both. I believe he called himself Hodgeman Drury for a while—but he was buried “Hodge Lurie” thanks to our landlady’s best guess at the crowded consonants of his name when the hearse came to take his body away.

Our mattress, I remember, was stained. I stood on the stairs to watch the Coachman load my father into his wagon. When they drove off the Landlady put her hand on my head and let me linger. The evening downpour had withdrawn, so a sunset reddened the street. The horses looked ablaze. After that, my father never came to me again, not in the waters, not even in dreams.

That Landlady prayed night after night before a cross on the wall. Her mercy got me hard bread and a harder mattress. In return, I took to praying with my palms together and helped tend her lodgings. Ran up and down stairs with buckets of soapwater, hunted rats, wedged myself up chimneys. Staring men who sat in the shadows sometimes lunged for me. I was a skin-and-bones kid, but unafraid enough of stairwell drunks to kick them while they slept, so they learned to leave me alone. Another summer, another plague, another visit from the Coachman and his black horses. Another and another. A mess of script appeared on our curbpost. Can you read that? the Landlady asked me. It says “pesthouse”—do you know what “pesthouse” means? It turned out to mean empty rooms, empty purse, empty bellies for us both. When the Coachman next came around, she sent me away with him. Just stood there, staring down at the coin he put in her hand.

I bunked in the Coachman’s stable for a year. He was the cleanest man I ever knew. Couldn’t get to sleep without his house just so and his slippers side by side under the bed. The only unevenness to him was an upper tooth that had come in a tusk, giving him the look of a fancy rat. Together we went round the dens and fleahouses on Bleecker Street to collect the dead: lodgers who’d passed in their sleep, or had their throats cut by bunkmates. Sometimes they were still in their beds with the sheets drawn over them when we arrived. But just as often we’d find them folded into trunks or stuffed under floorboards. Those with cash and kin we took to the undertaker. The nameless we drove to uptown hospitals and delivered through back doors so they could be tabled before wakes of looming young men. Their innards laid out. Their bones boiled white.

When trade was slow, we’d have to pull them from churchyards. Two dollars to the gatekeep to look the other way while we walked among the crosses searching out newly turned mounds. The Coachman would start a tunnel where he guessed the head might be, and I would wedge down, shoulders and arms, all the way into the cold earth and stab forward with my iron until I broke the coffinboards. Then I’d feel about with my fingers till I found hair or teeth, and ease a noose over the head. It took both of us to pull them out.

“Still easier than digging them up,” was the Coachman’s reasoning.

Sometimes the mound fell in on itself, and sometimes the body caught and we had to leave it there half-dug; and sometimes they were women and sometimes kids, too, and the graveyard earth couldn’t be got out of my clothing no matter how hot the washhouse kettle.

Once, we found two people sharing a coffin, face-to-face, as though they’d fallen asleep in it together. Once, I put my hand in and felt only the give of earth and the damp velvet of the pillow. “Someone’s beat us here,” I said. “It’s empty.”

Once, I broke through the boards and moved my fingers over coarse hair and skin and was just getting the rope past a reef of jawbone when fingers grabbed my wrist somewhere in the dark. They were dry fingers, hard-tipped. I started and dirt flew down my throat and into me. I kept kicking, but the fingers held on till I thought I’d disappear down that hole. “Please, I can’t do it again,” I sobbed afterwards—but I could, it turned out, with a broken wrist, and a twisted shoulder, too.

Once, a great big fella got stuck halfway out his coffin. I sat there in the dirt with his pale arm on my knees until the Coachman handed me a saw. I carried that arm all the way uptown, wrapped in its own burlap sleeve, on my shoulder like a ham. Some evenings later, I saw that same rent sleeve on a one-armed giant who stood unmoving in the fishmarket crowd. He was pale and round and stood smiling shyly at me, as though we were old friends. He drifted closer, hugging that empty sleeve, till he stood at my side. It seems an odd thing to say, but a thin tickle spread around me, and I knew he’d put his ghost arm about my shoulders. That was the first I ever got this strange feeling at the edges of myself—this want. He let forth a rueful sigh. As if we’d been talking all the while. “God,” he said. “God I’ve an awful hunger. I’d love a nice cod pie. Wouldn’t you, little boss?”

“F*** you,” said I, and fled.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07KNT5SXQ
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House (August 13, 2019)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ August 13, 2019
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 3.0 MB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 386 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #276,107 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #331 in Literary Sagas
- #1,393 in Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Literary Fiction
- #1,746 in Historical Literary Fiction

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4.0 1,643 ratings

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Téa Obreht

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Téa Obreht was born in Belgrade in the former Yugoslavia in 1985 and has lived in the United States since the age of twelve. Her writing has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and The Guardian, and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. She has been named by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty and included in the National Book Foundation’s list of 5 Under 35. Téa Obreht lives in New York.

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Customers find the book engaging and well-written. They praise the vivid descriptions and imaginative narrative style. Many describe the content as mystical, magical, and spiritual. However, opinions differ on the story quality, with some finding it compelling and unique, while others feel it's confusing and veers off into another storyline.

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Readability Writing style Imagination Narrative style Mystical content Story quality Character development

47 customers mention "Readability"37 positive10 negative

Customers find the book engaging and well-written. They describe it as a remarkable novel with stunning imagination. Readers praise the raw portrayal of characters and consider the ending worth every page. The narrative vision is described as awesome, mystical, and poetic.

"...of the southwest with both lyricism and reverence; the book is a love song to the topography of this part of the country even as the story itself..." Read more

"...It was to me an interesting, uneven mixture of fine descriptive writing, literary overreach, and mistakes in technique...." Read more

"...If not, assume I am still heaping it on. This is more than a fine book, it's the best novel I've read in years." Read more

"...And thus we go on." The book has its flaws. It is long in terms of number of pages and its density makes it feel much longer...." Read more

45 customers mention "Writing style"32 positive13 negative

Customers enjoy the writing style. They find the subject matter fascinating and appreciate the brilliant language. The characters and story are described as mystical, magical, and poetic.

"...the author writes about the landscape of the southwest with both lyricism and reverence; the book is a love song to the topography of this part of..." Read more

"...There is some lovely writing, and the subject matter is fascinating, reminding us all that we have no operating definition of hardscrabble in our..." Read more

"...Let me instead say that Obreht is more than a magnificent writer; she is among the very best American writers!..." Read more

"...Completely different characters, timeframes, etc. The author is not successful at alternating between them over 300+ pages...." Read more

38 customers mention "Imagination"28 positive10 negative

Customers enjoy the book's imaginative writing. They appreciate the well-crafted descriptions and intricate details of the characters and setting. The narrative vision is described as awesome, poignant, and vivid.

"...genres and challenges their limits and conventions, its themes are universal yet timely, the perspective is multifaceted, perception is reality, and..." Read more

"...of the American West and shows the potential for depth and varied interpretation in this frequently slighted genre...." Read more

"...corner of Arizona like the best of our poets, she considers the human condition like a philosopher and she paints a portrait of Nora -- mother, wife..." Read more

"...Too much convention becomes cliché and the writing becomes banal. Too little leaves the reader swinging in the wind. I was in the wind often...." Read more

10 customers mention "Narrative style"10 positive0 negative

Customers find the narrative style vivid and original, painting a vivid and original portrait of the Old West. They say it's a worthwhile contribution to the literature of the American West and shows potential for depth. The book reaches far into the well of literary fiction, described as a top all-time literary Western novel. The author offers a broad portrait of the American West both in its beauty and harshness. The imagery is incredible, and the journey you travel on with the main characters is incredible.

"...This book is deserving of a major literary award. I hope it receives the acclaim I feel it has earned...." Read more

"...I felt the book showed a love and understanding of the West and of the United States with all their challenges, a critical quality for a Western...." Read more

"...The book reaches far into the well of literary fiction. It is deeply descriptive of emotions and places, often beautifully rendered...." Read more

"...she considers the human condition like a philosopher and she paints a portrait of Nora -- mother, wife, toiler on the small, hard-scrabble spread..." Read more

7 customers mention "Mystical content"7 positive0 negative

Customers find the book mystical, spiritual, and poetic. They appreciate the author's gift for quotable aphorisms and her depiction of her dusty corner of Arizona as a shaman.

"...writes about the landscape of the southwest with both lyricism and reverence; the book is a love song to the topography of this part of the country..." Read more

"...The author shows a gift for quotable aphorisms. that bring out the meaning of the story better than the lengthy chapters...." Read more

"...She thinks like a shaman, she visualizes her dusty corner of Arizona like the best of our poets, she considers the human condition like a..." Read more

"...it reimagines a the wild west of outrageous diversity with insight, mysticism and unique perspective. Brilliant!" Read more

38 customers mention "Story quality"23 positive15 negative

Customers have different views on the story. Some find it compelling and interesting with a unique plot and great description of the setting. They praise the author as a master storyteller, and the subject matter is fascinating. However, others find the story confusing, with repeated events and long stretches between each storyline. The conclusion is satisfying for some readers.

"...at its zenith; it draws from different genres and challenges their limits and conventions, its themes are universal yet timely, the perspective is..." Read more

"...The first involves the Army's experiment with camels. The story soon breaks off from the arrival of the camels in San Antonio to focus on a single..." Read more

"...There is some lovely writing, and the subject matter is fascinating, reminding us all that we have no operating definition of hardscrabble in our..." Read more

"...Nora's story was compelling as well. A good read" Read more

22 customers mention "Character development"13 positive9 negative

Customers have different views on the character development. Some find the characters well-developed with great voices, while others find them unlikable and the story drags due to lack of attachment to the characters.

"...The characters are memorable, the plotting is sophisticated and elegant, the deployment of language precise, expressive, and hypnotic...." Read more

"...Completely different characters, timeframes, etc. The author is not successful at alternating between them over 300+ pages...." Read more

"...Each story has a detailed complex texture with many characters and sub-stories...." Read more

"...However, its outlook is so bleak and violent, and its characters so unlikable, that I gritted my teeth to get through it...." Read more

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Linda Seville
Provocative, powerful, poignant
Reviewed in the United States on August 30, 2019
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I had not read O’Breht’s debut work of fiction so approached this book with no preconceived expectations. I found Inland to be breathtaking in its dexterity with the art-form of the novel. One critic had used the word “propulsive” to describe the experience of reading this author; I agree whole-heartedly. It is not like being asked to high tea. It is finding yourself in the Sonoran desert after 3 days of hiking having lost your knapsack, map and compass and coming across a canteen filled with cold, filtered, crystal clear water. And speaking of the desert, the author writes about the landscape of the southwest with both lyricism and reverence; the book is a love song to the topography of this part of the country even as the story itself recasts the myth of the American West in light of the reality and moral ambivalence of its conquest. The characters are memorable, the plotting is sophisticated and elegant, the deployment of language precise, expressive, and hypnotic. The book represents post post-modern literature at its zenith; it draws from different genres and challenges their limits and conventions, its themes are universal yet timely, the perspective is multifaceted, perception is reality, and the reader is invited to participate in the interpretation of the meaning.
I’ll share one tidbit and then leave the reader to discover the novel for him/herself. One of the minor themes in the novel is the relationship between names and identity, either in terms of their connections or their disconnections so I reflected upon this aspect. One character is named Burke. The association I made was to the philosopher and statesman, Edmund Burke but not remembering what he was famous for, I googled the reference. His most renowned quotation is: The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. Since this statement seemed to resonate with the moral dilemma addressed in the story, I was certain this was why the author incorporated this name. I attended a book signing in which I got to ask Ms. O’Breht what influenced her choice of names for characters and to what extent these were conscious decisions. I mentioned Burke in particular. She explained that she indeed gives much thought to what her characters would be called, but in the case of Burke, her reasoning was more mundane. In short, the choice of the name was based on the onomatopoetic relationship between the character’s appellation and his vocal orchestrations (my words, not hers). You need to see her demonstrate this to get the full picture.
This book is deserving of a major literary award. I hope it receives the acclaim I feel it has earned. If this doesn’t transpire, I hope the author takes pride and finds joy in crafting a work of literary artistry that has touched one reader’s heart so deeply. I couldn’t be thanklier.

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robin friedman
A Camel In The Old West
Reviewed in the United States on August 4, 2020
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I took the opportunity during the pandemic to revisit some of the episodes of "Have Gun Will Travel", a 1950 television western I loved when I was young. Among these episodes, was "The Great Mohave Chase" from 1957. Paladin has come into an unusual resource -- a camel surplussed by the United States Army -- which he uses to win a bet and to bring water to a parched California town. The show aptly makes use of the Army's failed effort in the 1850s and 60s to use camels in patrolling the deserts.

Tea Obrecht's 2019 novel "Inland" involves the Army's use of camels to a much greater degree than the show on the exploits of Paladin. An immigrant from the former Yugoslavia, Obrecht carries on a tradition of non-native born Americans becoming fascinated with the uniquely American genre of the Western and making valuable contributions to it. Among other sources, this tradition includes Puccini's opera, "The Girl of the Golden West" the "Spaghetti Westerns" on film, and the western novels of the German writer, Karl May. Obrecht's "Inland" is a worthy contribution to the literature of the American West and shows the potential for depth and varied interpretation in this frequently slighted genre.

Obrecht weaves together two stories. The first involves the Army's experiment with camels. The story soon breaks off from the arrival of the camels in San Antonio to focus on a single camel and its rogue rider with a criminal past. The rider is a killer named Lurie who runs away from the Army camel procession when he is pursued by a sheriff who knows his unsavory history. Lurie recounts most of his story while talking to his camel mount, Burke, to whom he becomes greatly attached.

Obrecht's second story is set in the Arizona Territory in 1893 in the small, fictitious homesteader community of Amargo. It centers around a tough, persistent family, the Larks, including Nora, her husband Emmett, the couple's three sons and their daughter who died in infancy, an aged grandmother and a young woman related to Emmett, Josie, who works as a domestic, and is able to communicate with the dead through seances. The story of Amargo involves a lengthy drought, a conflict between the longstanding homesteaders and the cattle barons in the adjacent community for control of the county and the track towards statehood, and difficult personal issues arising in part from the harshness and loneliness of life in the developing community.

The two stories are told in lengthy alternating sections and for the most part are seemingly separate until Obrecht brings them together in the latter part of the book. Each story has a detailed complex texture with many characters and sub-stories. The author offers a broad portrait of the American West both in its beauty, expanse, and harshness. Her perspective is gritty and hard but also verges on the mystical. I felt the book showed a love and understanding of the West and of the United States with all their challenges, a critical quality for a Western. In its combination of the realistic and the mystical a perspective sometimes called "magic realism" I was reminded of a wonderful National Book Award winning novel, "Sing Unburied Sing" by Jesmyn Ward. which is set in Mississippi and also explores spirituality and realism.

The writing sometimes flags but is often beautiful. The author shows a gift for quotable aphorisms. that bring out the meaning of the story better than the lengthy chapters. For example, here is a portion of a discussion between Lurie and a fellow camel driver.

"There are wounds of time and there are wounds of person, [Lurie]. Sometimes people come through their wounds, but time does not. Sometimes it's the other way around. Sometimes the wounds are so grievous, there's no coming through them at all."

"Why not?"

"Because man is only man. And god, in His infinite wisdom, made it so that to live, generally is to wound another. And He made very man blind to his own weapons, and too short-living to do anything but guard jealously his own small, wasted way. And thus we go on."

The book has its flaws. It is long in terms of number of pages and its density makes it feel much longer. The two stories are ultimately not fully integrated. The long lengths of the chapters with no apparent connection between the stories makes the novel difficult to follow. The details and side stories were frequently evocative but they were also distracting and confusing.

With the book's difficulties, I was glad to find this work. I have become attracted to the Western in recent years, and Obrecht's book carries on and adds to a venerable tradition. There is much more to the best works in the genre than violence and shoot-outs.

The Library of America has recently published a volume "The Western: Four Novels from the 1940s and 50s" that might interest readers wanting to explore classic works in the genre. On of the works in the collection is "Warlock" a 1958 novel by Oakley Hall. "Warlock" is set in the Arizona Territory in the early 1880s about ten years before "Inland" and involves some of the same issues, including the conflict between ranchers and townspeople and conflicts between adjacent communities going different ways. The book includes a character loosely based on Wyatt Earp, but it doesn't include camels. It is also a dense, thoughtful work. Readers fascinated by "Inland" might be interested in "Warlock" or in other classic American Westerns.

Robin Friedman

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Paul Carrier
Beautifully written
Reviewed in Canada on June 27, 2020
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Beautifully written, suspenseful, keep my interest to the very end. Beautifully evoked that time and place.

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H. B.
Wunderbare Sprache
Reviewed in Germany on February 22, 2021
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Eines der besten Bücher, was ich in den letzten Jahren gelesen habe. Mag auch nicht jeder Leser vom Plot voll überzeugt sein, so wird man aber anerkennend sagen müssen, dass Téa Obreht durch ihre Sprache an das Buch fesseln kann.

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h h
a wonderful novel
Reviewed in France on November 23, 2019
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Théa Obreht takes you on a trip in settling North Amercica, family life and traveling traders and soldiers and migrants of all colours and religious beliefs ... through the eye and a the mind of a few, a mother keeping together a hopeless homestead without access to water, a single youth fleeing forward and his visions of the dead peoplinghis surroundings.
Emerges a rich magma of endless movement of characters and forces that lets one guess at where todays USA stem from.
Beautifully written, a surprising and captivating saga. If you haven't already, read as well her The Tiger's Wife, her first.

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She is a brilliant wordsmith.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 16, 2019
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Wonderful book. I had previously read her other book, The Tiger's Wife, and loved that so when I saw that she had written another novel I preordered it and wasn't disappointed. Completely different from her first book but just as enjoyable and tells you things about mid nineteenth century America you don't see in the movies.

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a.khare
A Wonderous Read. Don't miss this.
Reviewed in India on August 29, 2019
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Let me take a deep breath and then begin to rave breathlessly about INLAND. Exemplary writing by Tea Obreht. A follow up to THE TIGER'S WIFE was daunting. The author has written about such novel stories that she is incomparable.
There are two storylines so vague and different, you are left wondering about their eventual fate. There is Nora, a woman who is waiting for her husband and sons who have disappeared. And then there is Lurie, an outlaw who has been on the run all his life. They both are haunted by the ghosts of their past. Nora is left behind with her young son, Toby and a girl, Josie, who can communicate with spirits. Lurie too has a sense for departed beings, his companion being his camel, Burke. A camel in America? Yes, camels were used to trade water and salt in the inland areas where there was a dearth and this small bit of history is used effectively.
The beautiful lines are not the usual fare you read. If I could ably describe I would be Ms. Obreht! They are to be read to imbibe their magic. The path the two narratives take takes some concentration and I wish Kindle had included the XRAY setting to keep abreast with the various characters. The story does plod in places but don't be deterred , continue where the writing takes you as you will be richly rewarded by one of the most interesting conclusion.
"I have come to understand that extraordinary people are eroded by their worries while the useless are carried ever forward by their delusions ". How evocative can that be?

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Great plot and flow! Must read!

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5.0 out of 5 stars Provocative, powerful, poignant

4.0 out of 5 stars A Camel In The Old West

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5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully written

5.0 out of 5 stars Wunderbare Sprache

5.0 out of 5 stars a wonderful novel

5.0 out of 5 stars She is a brilliant wordsmith.

5.0 out of 5 stars A Wonderous Read. Don't miss this.

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Provocative, powerful, poignant

A Camel In The Old West

Beautifully written

Wunderbare Sprache

a wonderful novel

She is a brilliant wordsmith.

A Wonderous Read. Don't miss this.