On Swift Horses

(Paperback)

Available Formats

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Set in 1950s America at a time when people stopped looking west and started looking up: a breathtakingly beautiful debut novel of revolution, chance and the gambles we take with the human heart.
Muriel, newly married and newly orphaned, works as a waitress in a San Diego diner. As she pours coffee and empties ashtrays, she eavesdrops on her customers, the ex-jockeys and trainers of the Del Mar racetrack.

When she begins, secretly, to bet on the horses and, shockingly, to win, she feels strangely unready to share her good luck and its origins with her husband Lee.

Instead it is Lees brother, Julius, a thief and Korean War veteran and someone she has only met once whom she longs to tell, and who has struck a spark of promise and possibility inside her quietly ordered life.

Julius has found himself in Las Vegas, where his gift for gambling leads him to a job patrolling the boards above the casino tables, watching through the cigarette smoke forchancers and cheats. There he meets Henry, a blackjack artistand a man who shares Juliuss passions, and his secrets. As tourists gather on roof tops to watchatomic clouds bloomin the desert, Henry and Julius's love burns in the shadows until one night Henry is forced to flee.

Through the parks and plazas of Tijuana and the bars and beaches of San Diego,On Swift Horsesmesmerisingly charts the journeys of Muriel and Julius on their separate quests for freedom, new horizons and love.

Reviews

A story so vivid, so hauntingly told, you can almost feel its complex, conflicted characters appearing in front of you as you read iNews

Shannon Pufahls debut novel is a taut work reminiscent of Eleanor Cattons Booker winner The Luminaries and stylistically comparable to the best of Steinbeckk Irish Times

Imagine a cross betweenRevolutionary RoadandBattleborn (with a little bit ofBrokeback Mountainthrown 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 Oprah Magazine

A sad, slow, magnificent debutworth reading for the poetry alonethe prose is unexpectedly graceful: quietly lyrical and self-assured. Every word is considered; every sentence has shape Sunday Times Culture Magazine

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 Pufahls mid century West is dead-on right, as recognisable as a box of old photos and yet completely original in voice and scope Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins

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

Author Bio

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 literary theory and memoir. She lives in Monterey, California with her wife.