talked to Obreht about assimilation, the ghosts of the path and camels.

As Nora’s and Lurie’s timelines converge and they encounter Native Americans and Mexicans along the way, Obreht uses their stories to investigate who gets to settle the land and who gets displaced. Lurie finds himself falling in with a band of wranglers, all of whom had been transported to the deserts of the American West from the Middle East along with their unlikely charges: a group of five camels. Inland contains two narrative threads: It follows a day in the life of Nora Lark, a hardened frontierswoman who must locate water during a drought while her husband and eldest sons are away, and who also tends to chat with her deceased daughter regularly and the adventures of Lurie, an immigrant from the Ottoman Empire who also has a tendency to see ghosts. Ta Obreht’s wildly successful first novel, The Tiger’s Wife, was a tale of exuberant surrealist allegory.Its framing device was the dialogue between Natalia, a young doctor, and her storytelling grandfather, as they chewed over the history of an unnamed Balkan state. Obreht reimagines the American western with a combination of urgency and dread in Inland, set in the oppressive heat and dust of the Arizona Territory in 1893. 3 p.m., with such options as create-your-own crepe station, chilled seafood bar & carving station. The stories are separate until they come together with no apparent connection except physical. 2 days ago &0183 &32 EUROPA VILLAGE: Lavish Mother’s Day Brunch at Bolero Restaurante will be May 14, 10 a.m. If The Tiger’s Wife explores the mythology of a Balkan country, seemingly based on the 33-year-old author’s birthplace of Belgrade in the former Yugoslavia, then Inland unravels the legends and lore of her current homeland, the United States. Inland traces the stories of two people, Nora and Lurie/Misafir. It’s difficult not to feel thirsty while reading Inland, Téa Obreht’s expansive second novel following The Tigers’s Wife, her National Book Award–nominated 2011 debut.

Inland by Téa Obreht