Hi my name is Téa Obreht and my book is Inland. It's based on real history and
it's set in the American West in the nineteenth century and it follows two
lives. The first of these lives belongs to Lurie. He's an immigrant from the
Balkans who's brought over to New York by his father. And he ends up
orphaned, ends up a gravedigger and then after moving to Missouri on an orphan
train ends up an outlaw on the run and he seeks shelter from the law by joining
the United States Camel Corps. Which was a real thing that I accidentally
discovered and which prompted me to write this book in the first place. When
the military brought over camels from the Middle East
to serve as pack animals in the American Southwest. So there's a lot of true
history in that narrative strand. The other story concerns Nora. She's a
homesteading woman in Arizona Territory in 1893 in a little town called Amargo.
And she's having a really bad day. Her husband, a newspaper man, has vanished in
search of water. The town is going through a terrible drought and is also
enduring a challenge from the neighboring town of Ash River for the
county seat which can be disastrous in both fiction and fact. And her son Toby
who is a child of wild imagination keeps insisting that he has seen strange
tracks around their homestead. How these two lives intersect is the story of this
book. There's a lot of real history in it and a lot of myth, ghost narratives and
family lore as well. I'm here at Waterstones Piccadilly and I'd like to
tell you about three books that I've recently loved and the first of them is
What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi, who is an international treasure
and a writer of transcendent abilities. This is a short story collection from
which I teach quite often because the feats of this storyteller are remarkable.
She writes short stories that feel like novels and novels that feel like short
stories so really she just dispenses entirely with the norms of the form. Her
work is... some people say it's
magical and it is magical but her work weaves fable and magical realism
together in a really surprising and truly stupendous way. You never know
where one of her short stories is going to go. They always feel deeply relevant
and wildly unpredictable and she's just a marvel. My second pick is The Sisters
Brothers by Patrick DeWitt. This book came out some years ago.
I read it pretty much every year. This is the film adaptation cover which features
a scowling John C. Reilly and a scowling Joaquin Phoenix. It's an excellent film
but we're here to talk about the book which follows two mercenary brothers in
the Wild West on a mission in Oregon to kill a man. One of the brothers is
becoming rather disenchanted with the enterprise to which they've committed
their lives and the other is all for it. The book is hilarious, gutting, a really
wild reinvention of the form, a really wild reinvention of the genre and
I think it will appeal equally to lovers of westerns and lovers of Patrick
de Witt's other work. And to close things out I'd like to direct you to a stunning
debut by author Sue Rainsford. This book is Follow Me To Ground and it is 'weird
tender and haunted' according to an author named Téa Obreht (that's me). When I first read
this book I was astonished by what Sue was doing with her sentences and
with myth-making and fairy tale telling in general.
It's about a father and daughter who have a rather unusual mechanism of healing.
I wouldn't call it horror but I wouldn't not call it horror. It's a book that will
stay with you for a long time after you've read it and you will find
yourself ruminating on a lot more than just the things we do
to preserve our sense of self and the things that make us afraid. Thank you so much for watching.