Tea Obhret's INLAND The America Western Frontier

Tea Obhret's stunning debut novel "The Tigers Wife" was a Nat'l Book  Finalist and receive the Orange Prize.  This lyrical & mystical novel was set in an unnamed Balkan country.  Obhret's 2nd novel INLAND is an American Western Frontier 19th C saga.  The story originates in an unnamed Serbian nation. Our first raconteur is Djuric (Americanized to Lurie).  He travels across the Atlantic with his father at a young age with little memory of the crossing but for the dead laid out in shrouds along the stern.  When Lurie father dies shortly after arriving, Lurie recalls his father's corpse being loaded into the Coachman's wagon for burial.  After his death "my father never came to me again, not in the waters, not even in dreams."  Lurie augurs the cohabitation between the living and the dead.  The next time Lurie meets the Coachman he goes to work with him robbing graves.  Lurie found work robbing graves.  He recalls the ghost of a corpse "I knew he'd put his ghost arm about my shoulders.  That was the first I ever got this strange feeling at the edges of myself."  Lurie falls in with a gang of robbers.  Fleeing the Marshall leads Lurie to the Wild West.  The narration picks up with Nora, a pioneer in unsettled AZ with her husband to raise their family.  Nora's first born, Evelyn dies in infancy but maintains an omnipresent conversant with her mother.  Nora finds normalcy & comfort  in their ongoing dialogues.  Josie comes to live with the family.  She professes to sense apparitions around their homestead.  Nora debunks this as utter nonsense despite accepting her daughter's ubiquitous spirit.  The novel reads similarly to Sebastian Barry's "Days without End".   Obhret paints a mosaic of the beauty of an unspoiled, unsettled and lawless west with its harsh struggles & violent ways of life.  Obhret is a remarkable & commanding writer.  She writes of those who believe in the power of communion with the dead and other living unmoored souls.  INLAND speaks mournfully of duplicity, loneliness and regret.  Nora recognizes falsehood as the preservative that enables the world to maintain itself.  Everyone keeps some part of themselves hidden away,  even from their loved ones.