A story of love and luck, about two people trying to find their place in a falling country even as it promises them everything. 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. On Swift Horses is a beautiful book by author Shannon Pufahl. 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. DEBUT After their navy discharge in the early 1950s, Lee and brother Julius, along with Lees wife, Muriel, hope for a better life in postwar San Diego. 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. And so she begins slipping off to the Del Mar racetrack, to bet and eavesdrop, learning the language of horses and risk. 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. ‘On Swift Horses is a marvel, a beautifully written novel that traces its raw, guarded characters from California to Las Vegas to Mexico with grace and inevitability. Muriel is newly married and restless, transplanted from her rural Kansas hometown to life in a dusty bungalow in San Diego. A lonely newlywed and her wayward brother-in-law follow divergent and dangerous paths through the postwar American West.
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