“If electromagnetic pulses could fly through the air, if giants with shin bones the length of her entire body had once roamed ancient seas, if the world was plagued by legions of creatures so minuscule that no living eye could see them but so vicious that they could lay waste to entire cities, was it not also possible that Josie’s claims however exploitative and preposterous might hold some truth. Might the dead truly inhabit the world alongside the living? Laughing. Thriving. Growing. And occupying themselves with the myriad mundanities of the afterlife, invisible merely because the mechanism of seeing them had yet to be invented.”

This story is set in a bizarre time in American history when camels were brought over to be used as pack animals in the Southwest. Inland captures the changing, bone-dry landscape of that forges the lives of two disparate characters: a Balkan cameleer and a hardened frontierswoman.

I loved this tale, which so carefully captured the fine edge between life and death that these characters walked.