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by Shannon Pufahl
A lonely newlywed and her wayward brother-in-law follow divergent and dangerous paths through the postwar American West.
Muriel is newly married and restless, transplanted from her rural Kansas hometown to life in a dusty bungalow in San Diego. The air is rich with the tang of salt and citrus, but the limits of her new life seem to be closing in: She misses her freethinking mother, dead before Muriel's nineteenth birthday, and her sly, itinerant brother-in-law, Julius, who made the world feel bigger than she had imagined. And so she begins slipping off to the Del Mar racetrack to bet and eavesdrop, learning the language of horses and risk. Meanwhile, Julius is testing his fate in Las Vegas, working at a local casino where tourists watch atomic tests from the roof, and falling in love with Henry, a young card cheat. When Henry is eventually discovered and run out of town, Julius takes off to search for him in the plazas and dives of Tijuana, trading one city of dangerous illusions and indiscretions for another.
On Swift Horses is a debut of astonishing power: a story of love and luck, of two people trying to find their place in a country that is coming apart even as it promises them everything.
BookBrowse Review
"Set in the postwar U.S., On Swift Horses alternates chapters between Muriel, a young newlywed who has recently relocated from Kansas to San Diego and become fascinated by the city's racetrack, and her wayward brother-in-law Julius, a young gay man working in a casino in Las Vegas. Both characters are unhappy and haunted by their discontent, and the novel explores the bond between them even as they're physically separated from one another. Unfortunately what has the potential to be a quietly potent and contemplative read becomes muted with an overly languid pace that meanders and never quite drives home the novel's themes." - Rachel Hullett
Other Reviews
"The book is filled with such rhythmically lovely, splendidly evocative, and masterfully precise descriptions. In these moments, it feels like Pufahl could not possibly have said what she needed to say with any other words. Fiction to linger over." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Peopled by singular characters and suffused with a keen sense of time and place, Pufahl's debut casts a fascinating spell. This melancholy story will show up in the dreams of those whose heartstrings it has tugged." - Publishers Weekly
"Imagine a cross between Revolutionary Road and Battleborn (with a little bit of Brokeback Mountain thrown in) and you might end up with something akin to Pufahl's debut, a rich and rugged suburban western about dreams deferred and living defiantly." - O, the Oprah Magazine
"Achingly beautiful...Pufahl's language glitters from the page...[a] restless, blistering fever dream that feels a lot like life." - Nylon
"Once in a rare while you come across a novel of such transfixing beauty that it enlarges your faith in the medium itself. On Swift Horses is, for me, one of those books. As an exploration of life lived in the outer distances of plain sight, it is suffused with hazard and touched by grace, furnished with the longevity of a postwar classic and the immediacy of the present tense. It is, simply put, a masterpiece." - Anthony Marra, author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
"On Swift Horses is about both risk and the risqué, about daring to know, name, and act on our own desires. Read this book for the adventure, for the keening lyricism of the lost and searching, but mostly read this book because no one writes like Shannon Pufahl. Her voice is muscular, awesome, and pure. This book knocked me flat on my back." - Justin Torres, author of We the Animals
"On Swift Horses is a marvel, a beautifully written novel that traces its raw, guarded characters from California to Las Vegas to Mexico with grace and inevitability. Shannon Pufahl's mid-century West is dead-on right, as recognizable as a box of old photos and yet completely original in voice and scope." - Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins
This information about On Swift Horses was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Shannon Pufahl grew up in rural Kansas. She teaches at Stanford University, where she was a Stegner Fellow in fiction. Her essays have appeared in The Threepenny Review and elsewhere, on topics ranging from John Brown and the antebellum Midwest, to personal memoir. She lives in the Bay Area with her wife and their dog.
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