On Swift Horses

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She remembers what her mother used to say, when it was time to leave a man or find a new one. That there was no roll credits moment, that life kept moving, that every pleasure ended and could only be replaced. Muriel is newly married and restless, transplanted from her rural Kansas hometown to life in a dusty bungalow in San Diego. 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 nineteenth birthday, and her sly, itinerant brother-in-law, Julius, who made the world feel bigger than she had imagined. And so she begins slipping off to the Del Mar racetrack, eavesdropping, learning the language of horses and risk. 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. 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 illusions and indiscretions for another. On Swift Horses is an intimate and astonishing story of love and luck, of two people trying to find their place in a country that is coming apart even as it promised them everything.