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On Swift Horses

On Swift Horses

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 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 promised them everything.

Author: Shannon Pufahl | Publisher: Riverhead

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Rating: 4.5 / 5

On Swift Horses is a beautiful slow burn with language that draws you in like music. Like others who have read it before me, I simply couldn’t read it quickly; I had to linger over every sentence, speak them in my mind as I read, and let them sink into my bones and heart.

The book alternates between the perspectives of two main characters: Muriel and her brother-in-law, Julius. During their time in the armed service, Julius and his brother promise one another that someday they’ll buy a plot of land in California, build a house, and settle there. Then Muriel enters the picture and Julius leaves it — a vagabond, a card player, a gay man who lives a life just beneath the society that would punish him for it.

At work, Muriel begins to eavesdrop over a table of men who speak nothing but horse racing. She takes notes and one day, sneaks off to bet on her own. What that gives her sends her spiraling toward the life she never knew — and somehow always knew — she wanted. Meanwhile, Julius takes off for Vegas and meets his eventual-love Henry, another card player. The two of them work for a casino, walking the rafters above one-way mirrors and catching those who cheat below. Then Henry goes missing, and Julius has to go find him. But he has no money and nothing but the shirt on his back.

The way these two characters stories unfold alongside one another, with one another, meeting and parting and bouncing off one another. Existing and living and loving and wondering and hurting and searching.

Every time I finished a chapter of this book — anywhere from 30 to 50 pages — I looked up and wondered what day it was. I had been so absorbed in the lyricism. If you’re looking for a plot-driven story, this isn’t it — there are long chapters that don’t move the story along much, because the real story is about the characters, not the plot. But if you like to linger over people and the things that connect us to one another, as humans, then this is the book for you.

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