Lurie’s memories of his father are vague and fragmentary he knows the man was running from something, though he never learned what. We become his rapt audience, as if we are with him, somewhere along the Missouri in the late 1890s, with flight in us too. The stunning moment when Lurie and his traveling companion meet Nora is the most brilliant scene in the novel.įrom the outset, the fact that Lurie’s listener is off the page captures the reader’s attention. Lurie’s chapters cover his entire life, while Nora’s take place in a single day. The other narrative centers on Nora Lark, a brusque homesteader in the Arizona Territory, a survivor of twenty years of toil on the parched frontier waiting for her husband to return home with a fresh supply of water. His chapters cover his flight from the law along the Missouri and south to Indianola, Texas, where he meets the companion now listening to his story, and they journey farther west together. Their bones boiled white.” When caught, Lurie and other thieving boys are deported by train to the lawless West, where his life of crime escalates. He survived by collecting the dead from fleahouses on Bleecker Street or, when business is slow, by exhuming corpses from churchyards, and delivering them to hospitals to be cut up and studied: “Their innards laid out. As a child, Lurie emigrated with his father from Ottoman Herzegovina to New York City, where his father’s sudden death left him orphaned at age six. It opens with a man known as Lurie (anglicized from Djurić) sharing events from his boyhood with an unidentified listener. The novel takes place in the mid-to-late-nineteenth century and is told in alternating narratives.

Inland, her highly anticipated second novel, does not disappoint. It was a finalist for the National Book Award, a New York Times bestseller, and awarded the Orange Prize for Fiction. Téa Obreht’s first novel, The Tiger’s Wife, was published in 2011 to great acclaim.

Inland by Téa Obreht