For much of the book Lurie takes cover in the camel corps - led by a charming Turk named Hadji Ali - and bonds with his trusty camel Burke. An immigrant Muslim from the Ottoman Empire, Lurie is also a wanted man, pursued by a dogged marshal on a charge for manslaughter. Lurie also communes with the dead, absorbing the posthumous “want” of his partners-in-crime as he traverses the territories. Nora is left to protect and watch over an invalid mother, her youngest son, and an annoying teen ward who conducts séances in town. The well at Nora’s farm has run dry, and her husband Emmett, the local newspaperman, has left to find water her two grown sons soon follow. (An actual troop, and the novel’s genesis.)Īs you’d expect, life is punishing and violence ever-present. Parallel narratives follow Nora, a homesteader in the Arizona territories, and Lurie, an outlaw wanderer and conscripted “cameleer” in the U.S. Namely: the American West, spanning the second half of the 1800s. While Tiger’s Wife drew from Obreht’s childhood in the former Yugoslavia, Inland is set a world apart and a century earlier. Fortunately for us, her novel Inlandbears the same storytelling rigor and frictionless prose of its predecessor. We’d understand if Obreht let the acclaim go to her head. It was a National Book Awards Finalist, won the Orange Prize, and landed its 25-year-old author on the New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” list.
Téa Obreht’s debut The Tiger’s Wife casts quite the shadow. Ryan Chapman | Longreads | August 2019 | 15 minutes (4,042 words) Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.
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