On Swift Horses

‘A story so vivid, so hauntingly told, you can almost feel its complex, conflicted characters appearing in front of you as you read’ iNews

‘Shannon Pufahl’s debut novel is a taut work reminiscent of Eleanor Catton’s Booker winner The Luminaries and stylistically comparable to the best of Steinbeckk’ Irish Times

‘Imagine a cross between Revolutionary Road and Battleborn (with a little bit of ‘Brokeback Mountain’ thrown in) and you might end up with something akin to Pufahl’s debut, a rich and rugged suburban western about dreams deferred and living defiantly’ Oprah Magazine

‘A sad, slow, magnificent debut…worth reading for the poetry alone…the prose is unexpectedly graceful: quietly lyrical and self-assured. Every word is considered; every sentence has shape’ Sunday Times Culture Magazine

‘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. Shannon Pufahl’s mid century West is dead-on right, as recognisable as a box of old photos and yet completely original in voice and scope’ Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins

‘Once in a rare while you come across a novel of such transfixing beauty that it enlarges your faith in the medium itself. On Swift Horses is, for me, one of those books. As an exploration of life lived in the outer distances of plain sight, it is suffused with hazard and touched by grace, furnished with the longevity of a postwar classic and the immediacy of the present tense. It is, simply put, a masterpiece’ Anthony Marra, author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

Shannon Pufahl grew up in rural Kansas. She teaches at Stanford University, where she was a Stegner Fellow in Fiction. Her essays have appeared in The Threepenny Review and elsewhere, on topics ranging from John Brown and the Antebellum midwest, to literary theory and memoir. She lives in Monterey, California with her wife.