Inland: A Novel Audiobook

Quotes

• “A dynamic pair, Anna Chlumsky and Edoardo Ballerini, deliver an emotionally rich performance of this intricately woven story…transporting listeners to this mythic time and place. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”

  — AudioFile

• “The landscape of the West itself is a character, thrillingly rendered throughout.”

  — New York Times Book REview

• “Beautifully wrought.”

  — Vanity Fair

• “Exquisite…The historical detail is immaculate, the landscape exquisitely drawn; the prose is hard, muscular.”

  — The Guardian (London)

• “An ambitious and beautiful work about many things: immigration, the afterlife, responsibility, guilt, marriage, parenthood, revenge, all the roads and waterways that led to America.”

  — O, The Oprah Magazine

• What Obreht pulls off here is pure poetry. It doesn’t feel written so much as extracted from the mind in its purest, clearest, truest form.

  — Entertainment Weekly (Grade: A)

• As it should be, the landscape of the West itself is a character, thrillingly rendered throughout. . . . Here, Obreht’s simple but rich prose captures and luxuriates in the West’s beauty and sudden menace. Remarkable in a novel with such a sprawling cast, Obreht also has a poetic touch for writing intricate and precise character descriptions.

  — The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)

• Beautifully wrought.

  — Vanity Fair

• “Inland is a classic story, told in a classic way—and yet it feels wholly and unmistakably new. . . . At once a new Western myth and a far realer story than many we have previously received—and that’s even with all the ghosts.

  — NPR

• With Inland, Obreht makes a renewed case for the sustained, international appeal of the American West, based on a set of myths that have been continually shaped and refracted through outside lenses. . . . Discovering the particular genre conventions that Obreht has chosen to transfigure or to uphold soon becomes central to the novel’s propulsive appeal.

  — The New Yorker

• Propulsive . . . Obreht has swapped the tumultuous history of the former Yugoslavia for that of the American frontier. What she retains, in addition to infectious storytelling and a split, double narrative, is the strong sense of superstition which pervades the earlier fiction; a form of magic realism is at work here, which does not detract from the harshly explicit truths transmitted about the nature—and the price—of survival.

  — Financial Times

• Exquisite . . . The historical detail is immaculate, the landscape exquisitely drawn; the prose is hard, muscular, more convincingly Cormac McCarthy than McCarthy himself.

  — The Guardian

• In a moment where the book world fetishizes self-examination and minute, sentence-level showiness, it is not only a relief but a privilege to see Obreht shoot the moon with this sprawlingly ambitious and fully imagined tale.

  — San Francisco Chronicle

• Rivers of blood and ink have been spilled mythologizing the American Southwest, but rarely if ever with the sort of giddy beauty Téa Obreht brings to the page in Inland. . . . [She] displays dazzling dexterity and wit with the English language, transporting the reader to a fantastical late nineteenth century that borders on outright fantasy, where descriptions wax decadent and ghosts are treated as a matter of fact.

  — USA Today

• Téa Obreht’s M.O. is clear: She’s determined to unsettle our most familiar, cliché-soaked genres. . . . Inland can feel like Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian turned inside out: contemplative rather than rollicking, ghostly rather than blood-soaked.

  — Minneapolis Star Tribune