And in a way, her debut novel is a celebration of her grandmother embodied in a couple of its characters in a story set in the 1950s among dusty-shoed gamblers, boys back from war and the girls they marry, fleet horses, slick card sharks, unfinished highways and the beckoning West. Her family lived in rural Kansas, but Shannon's grandmother who was a brilliant poker player took her on sojourns to Las Vegas. Through the parks and plazas of Tijuana and the bars and beaches of San Diego, On Swift Horses mesmerisingly charts the journeys of Muriel and Julius on their separate quests for freedom, new horizons and love.Shannon Pufahl began a novel the year that her grandmother died. As tourists gather on roof tops to watch atomic clouds bloom in the desert, Henry and Julius's love burns in the shadows - until one night Henry is forced to flee. There he meets Henry, a blackjack artist and a man who shares Julius's passions, and his secrets. Julius has found himself in Las Vegas, where his gift for gambling leads him to a job patrolling the boards above the casino tables, watching through the cigarette smoke for chancers and cheats. Instead it is Lee's brother, Julius, a thief and Korean War veteran - and someone she has only met once - whom she longs to tell, and who has struck a spark of promise and possibility inside her quietly ordered life. When she begins, secretly, to bet on the horses and, shockingly, to win, she feels strangely unready to share her good luck and its origins with her husband Lee.
As she pours coffee and empties ashtrays, she eavesdrops on her customers, the ex-jockeys and trainers of the Del Mar racetrack. Muriel, newly married and newly orphaned, works as a waitress in a San Diego diner. Set in 1950's America at a time when people stopped looking west and started looking up: a breathtakingly beautiful debut novel of revolution, chance and the gambles we take with the human heart.
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