Inland by Téa Obreht

For the follow-up to her award-winning, Balkan-set debut, The Tiger’s Wife, Obreht switches focus to America’s Old West. The narrative jumps between Nora, a matriarch whose family is off in the wilderness, and Lurie, a down-on-his-luck outlaw. Obreht dodges dusty frontier tropes by mixing the historical and the mystical: Both characters are clairvoyants whose pioneer ad­ventures involve the living and the dead.