On Swift Horses

A Lambda Literary Award Finalist, 2020. A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Named a Most Anticipated Book of Fall by The New York Times, Real Simple, Electric Literature, and more. "Cinematic . . . The spaces she creates for her characters . . . have the aura of realms." --The New York Times Book Review 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