On Swift Horses (Hardback)

‘Worth reading for the poetry alone… every word is considered; every sentence has a shape.’ - The Sunday 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

'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

'On Swift Horses is about both risk and risque, about daring to know, name and act on our own desires. There are plenty of tales about stepping out into the light, here, thank god, is a novel about the particularly queer courage it takes to move into the shadows. Pufahl limns the borders of the prodigal and the moral, and there - among the seedy hotels, the off-duty sailors, the noise and dust of the horse races, in Tijuana and in Vegas - she finds new forms of fidelity and care. Read this book for the adventure, for the keening lyricism of the lost and searching, but mostly read this book because no one writes like Shannon Pufahl. Her voice is muscular, awesome and pure. This book knocked me flat on my back.' - Justin Torres, author of We the Animals