An internationally-acclaimed, award-winning novel can be a hard act for an author to follow. It's part of the reason why Markus Zusak took thirteen years to complete Bridge of Clay after The Book Thief.
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The pressure of success may also have hovered above Téa Obreht while writing her recently released second novel, Inland.
Obreht won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction with her debut novel, The Tiger's Wife - she was the youngest-ever recipient.
It was an ambitious novel, and refreshingly different, a detailed narrative that wove myth and superstition into a magical story of love, life and memory in the Balkans.
Inland is another sweeping novel. Set on the western frontier of America in the mid-late 1800s, the narrative follows two storylines destined to collide.
Lurie Mattie, the son of an immigrant from Bosnia/Herzegovina, is orphaned at a young age. He falls in with the wrong people, becomes an outlaw, and spends his life on the run.
Eventually he joins with the travelling US Camel Corps, a US Army initiative that trialled camels as pack animals in the south-west where water was limited.
The other protagonist is Nora Lark, a housewife struggling to raise a family on a parched property in Arizona.
Her husband, Emmett, who runs the local printing press, is three days overdue with a desperately needed load of water.
The whereabouts of their two older sons also is unknown, leaving Nora alone on the farm with her youngest semi-blind son, and Josie, the teenage daughter of a deceased relative.
It's tough, scraping a living on marginal land near a dying town.
The lack of water is palpable; I felt Nora's thirst.
I also felt her frustration with the local men who are mostly testosterone-driven and belligerent, as pioneering "roughneck" personalities can be: "miners and gamblers and pimps, swaggering dudes who'd found themselves lesser men than they believed".
But there are good men too.
Emmett tries hard, even though he lacks the drive to make things work, both with his printing press and with Nora. "You couldn't blame a man losing his lifework to a town going bust."
He doesn't understand how their hard scrabble life has hardened his wife; "Even if she had wanted to remain soft, the work would not allow it".
Another seemingly good man in Nora's life is Sheriff Harlan Bell; for years, she's been hovering on the brink of an affair with him, but has never quite taken the plunge.
Lurie is also portrayed as decent, despite his rugged outlaw beginnings. His concern for his camel, Burke, helped me warm to him.
And I liked the way his narrative is told as if he's relating his story to the camel.
This adds sensitivity to a complex narrative that encompasses many characters and places.
One of Obreht's numerous literary gifts is her use of magical realism, and both protagonists have relationships with the dead.
Lurie is constantly aware of ghosts, and tries to avoid them, or they will inhabit his soul and drive him to satisfy their "wants" or desires.
Despite her ridicule of all things supernatural, Nora engages in conversations with her deceased daughter who died as a "sundrowned" baby.
Josie also has skills connecting with the dead, and is able to channel spirits during séances.
Hauntings and superstition permeate local beliefs, and seem to assist in the acceptance of pervasive hardship, conflict and death.
This is a big novel. It's not the Wild West I grew up with, watching clichéd cowboys and Indians movies on our black and white TV.
Shoot-outs, raids and scalpings do occur, but they are not centre-stage, and Obreht also incorporates substantial history.
She uses contrasting time frames for her two protagonists; Lurie's journey is traced over several decades, while Nora's life is portrayed in one day.
This structure forces different scope and pace into the writing. However, the switch between timelines can be disorienting.
At times, I felt challenged by the vast territory traversed by Lurie in a just few pages, only to return to the detail of daily difficulties faced by Nora.
But the insight into life for pioneering women is illuminating - the fear, danger and tragic mistakes. And the sense of landscape is strong.
I could see the dusty stretches of land, wells gone dry, towns crumbling, the "scald of dead grass" and "goblin barrens", the "miles that couldn't be made unwild".
This is a novel to be savoured, not rushed.
Although momentum may initially seem slow, like the progress of a camel train, patience and persistence will be rewarded, as is so often the case with major literary works.
Half way through the book, the pages took off and galloped through to the finish.
Although momentum may initially seem slow, like the progress of a camel train, patience and persistence will be rewarded, as is so often the case with major literary works.
Inland is an epic novel that ventures into historical worlds both real and supernatural, painting a new and challenging perspective of pioneering in western America.
- Inland, by Tea Obreht. Hachette. $32.99
- Karen Viggers is a Canberra novelist. Her latest book is The Orchardist's Daughter.