Inland by Tea Obreht

The much awaited second book by this author has magical realism features, like her first book, but this is set in the late nineteenth century in the American West.
There are two intertwined tales. The book begins conventionally enough, with the story of an outlaw, Lurie, who is on the run. The twist lies in Obreht’s affinity for unusual transformations. He has a brief career as a gang member before falling in with the US Camel Corps on its way from Texas to California. While I knew nothing of it, the Camel Corps was a short-lived experiment introducing the animals into the US army as beasts of burden, manned by drivers from the Ottoman empire. Misidentified as a Turk in wanted posters, Lurie finds that his ambiguous ethnicity provides the perfect cover for a new life.  Lurie is just one of many wounded trying to remake themselves in a terrain whose emptiness serves as a clean slate for fantasies of conquest and escape. It’s interwoven with the tale of a single day in the life of Nora, a frontierswoman. She is doing her best to get through the Arizona drought as she waits for her husband to return from town with water. She is at home with her young son, her paralized mother-in-law and a servant girl who is convinced she has seen a strange beast prowling about the property in the night. 
Nora has her own ghosts, as she talks constantly to the spirit of her daughter, lost to heatstroke as a baby, while regretting the failed ideals that brought her family west. The portrayal of the American West as wild, dangerous, and prone to hallucinations is well told.