Off Into The Sunset

In “Inland,” Téa Obreht reimagines the Western.

- Francisco Cantu

Early in “Inland,” Téa Obreht’s new novel, we find the frontierswoman Nora Lark in the drought-stricken Arizona Territory, managing the fears of her seven-year-old son, Toby, who has discovered strange disturbances in the scrubland surrounding their homestead. The year is 1893. Toby has convinced himself that the tracks he’s found belong to some large fantastical beast, while Nora is certain the whole business is simply a product of her son’s overactive imagination. Soon Toby even claims to have seen the beast: huge and skeletal, with a ratty mane, folded wings on its back, and a pungent stink.

“Inland” itself cuts an odd figure in the Western landscape, and is a surprising follow-up to Obreht’s début novel, “The Tiger’s Wife” (2011), which garnered broad critical acclaim and sold more than a million copies worldwide. Obreht, born in the former Yugoslavia in 1985, set “The Tiger’s Wife” in an unnamed Balkan country emerging from war. As her protagonist recounted the stories and legends told by her recently deceased grandfather, the novel’s sense of place took on an air of universality. The stories, like the myths and folktales they invoked, transcended the specifics of time, location, and history.