I like westerns. To someone who has seen the open spaces, wide skies, and unimaginable features of the American west - and was drawn to them enough to live among them - westerns represent the desires and imaginations of those who came before us as they stood before the same bluffs and mountains we stand before today. The west is timeless but fragile; teeming with a life all its own, while, for many, it represents a blank canvas on which to impress their own machinations. Téa Obreht casts her characters into that hard scrabble west just as its wild days were coming to a close. An unlikely camel corps becomes an outlaw’s refuge as he grapples with the dead’s desires. The redoubtable Nora Lark - a protagonist I won’t soon forget - scrambles to keep her homestead afloat in the face of drought and an uncertain future for her small Arizona community as she goes toe to toe with a avaricious cattleman. Thrilling, magical, and searing, Obreht writes of a place that died just as it was born- just as the brutality and blind greed that settled the west seethe around her brilliant characters doing their best to survive another day.