As tourists gather on roof tops to watch atomic clouds bloom in the desert, Henry and Julius’s love burns in the shadows – until one night Henry is forced to flee.
There he meets Henry, a blackjack artist and a man who shares Julius’s passions, and his secrets. Julius has found himself in Las Vegas, where his gift for gambling leads him to a job patrolling the boards above the casino tables, watching through the cigarette smoke for chancers and cheats. Instead it is Lee’s brother, Julius, a thief and Korean War veteran – and someone she has only met once – whom she longs to tell, and who has struck a spark of promise and possibility inside her quietly ordered life. When she begins, secretly, to bet on the horses and, shockingly, to win, she feels strangely unready to share her good luck and its origins with her husband Lee.
As she pours coffee and empties ashtrays, she eavesdrops on her customers, the ex-jockeys and trainers of the Del Mar racetrack. Muriel, newly married and newly orphaned, works as a waitress in a San Diego diner. 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 promises them everything.A breathtakingly beautiful debut novel of revolution, chance and the gambles we take with the human heart. 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 and indiscretions for another. 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 19th birthday, and her sly, itinerant brother-in-law, Julius, who made the world feel bigger than she had imagined. Muriel is newly married and restless, transplanted from her rural Kansas hometown to life in a dusty bungalow in San Diego. The spaces she creates for her characters.have the aura of realms." ( The New York Times Book Review ) A lonely newlywed and her wayward brother-in-law follow divergent and dangerous paths through the postwar American West. Named a Most Anticipated Book of Fall by The New York Times, Real Simple, Electric Literature, and more. 13 Books to Watch For in November, The New York Times Best Books of 2019 So Far, Real Simple The 20 Best Debuts of the Second Half of 2019, Electric Lit 30 Most Anticipated Fiction Books for Fall 2019, Kirkus Reviews A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice.
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