At 37, Nora is middle-aged for the late 19th century, and there is a palpable weariness as she begins to question former certainties, from her relationship with her husband to whether life as a homesteader is worth the grief and toil. Nora can be harsh and unyielding, and we may wish her to be kinder to those who need her (especially Josie, her husband’s clairvoyant young cousin), but with each new section we see how the seclusion and constant risks of frontier life have hardened her. Nora’s sections keep the reader on edge. We don’t know how she’ll find a way out of her mounting troubles or what she might encounter when she does. There is only the deepening sense that something is badly awry.

Obreht is at her most captivating when she reveals Nora’s innermost thoughts, especially those she hesitates to acknowledge on the edges of her consciousness. Nora’s ongoing dialogue with her long-dead daughter could be imagined or real, and her relationship with the town’s sheriff, Harlan Bell, may be innocent, simply intensified by her loneliness and isolation — just as, given the uncertain physical dangers that surround her, a shadow could be a passing steer or a rider come to kill them all. Still, her daughter’s voice and Harlan’s presence fill her with longing and guilt.

As it should be, the landscape of the West itself is a character, thrillingly rendered throughout in phrases such as “red boil of twilight” and “a stillness so vast the small music of the grasses could not rise to fill it.” 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. Lurie’s father is a “hard-laboring man who never caught more rest than he did that swaying month when night and day went undiffered.” Another minor character’s “God-given eloquence was buttressed on all sides by charms he’d cultivated throughout a long life of asking forgiveness for assorted transgressions about which he was alternately boastful and ashamed.” “Inland” has the stoic heroic characters and the requisite brutal violence of the Western genre, but the decision to place an immigrant and a middle-aged mother at its center is a welcome deviation.

There are a few places in the novel where readers might struggle to pinpoint the present moment of the story. Perhaps this is because in the toggling back and forth between Lurie’s and Nora’s perspectives, there are quite a few characters with complex circumstances to keep track of. Or it could be because a good chunk of Nora’s predicament is revealed slowly, through flashbacks; these work well when the complications are secrets Nora is reluctant to share with herself, but less successfully when back story follows back story. Obreht is always skillful in her delivery of this pivotal information, but it is a formal technique that sometimes diminishes the urgency of the novel’s forward motion.