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. And so she begins slipping off to the Del Mar racetrack to bet and eavesdrop, learning the language of horses and risk. 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. Muriel is newly married and restless, transplanted from her rural Kansas hometown to life in a dusty bungalow in San Diego.

have the aura of realms.” - The New York Times Book ReviewĪ lonely newlywed and her wayward brother-in-law follow divergent and dangerous paths through the postwar American West. The spaces she creates for her characters. Named a Most Anticipated Book of Fall by The New York Times, Real Simple, Electric Literature, and more. Kristin Rasmussen, pages: a bookstore, Manhattan Beach, CAĪ New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. I was gutted by this novel and will return to it again and again.” On a deeper level, Pufahl has created a powerful depiction of the American West after WWII and explores the ways in which men and women existed in the margins of society.

“At its most basic, On Swift Horses is the story of two people, Julius and Muriel, connected by time and circumstance only to orbit each other throughout most of the book.

Karen Brissette, Shakespeare & Co., New York, NY Winter 2020 Reading Group Indie Next List Both are trying to make their own opportunities to find love and happiness-a gamble that one will unexpectedly win and one will just as unexpectedly lose. Muriel and Julius are restless outsiders, siblings-in-law who share a passion for gambling as well as their more furtive passion. “This densely atmospheric debut sinks its hooks deep into post-war America’s tender underbelly, exposing the homophobia and bigotry beneath a nation’s renewed spirit of hope and opportunity.

ON SWIFT HORSES by PUFAHL SHANNON