And that's a portrait of Las Vegas in the '50s. I want you to get a - read a section, if you could, that's so lyrical about horses and love and gambling.

SIMON: I want to give some attention to just the - if I may, the sheer gorgeousness of your prose.

And she doesn't know what it means to her. And I think that this is part of what she sees. And we learn, you know, later on that he is, in fact, gay, that he has male lovers. And I think part of what she recognizes him, in him is that he's a different kind of man. You know, there was very little public discourse in the '50s and early '60s about LGBT or queer life. PUFAHL: Part of what she sees in Julius really has to do with seeing something in someone that she's really never seen before. So tell us what you think there is in Julius that speaks to her. SIMON: Well, your powers with language are exquisite if I may say. And, you know, when they meet each other, they really have this kind of spark between them that Muriel really doesn't know how to describe. But that's not really the guy that intrigues her, is he? And so in many ways, you know, she's sort of the animating spirit of Muriel who takes a lot of risks and goes out on her own. And I think that for her finding ways in that era, in the '50s and '60s to be independent, you know, when models for singular identities for women were harder to find than they are now. And she drove all over the West, really, from one gambling mecca to another often alone. So she also taught me how to stand there and look serious and adult so that I wasn't caught. And, you know, she took me to Las Vegas very often when I was a kid and taught me how to play poker and slots even though I was under age. PUFAHL: My grandmother was in many ways a woman ahead of her time. SIMON: Where do we see your grandmother in Muriel? PUFAHL: Yeah, she and her husband, they've recently married and she gets a job, you know, empty and ashtrays and filling drink orders and begins to eavesdrop on these retired bookies and trainers and picks up tips from them, which she then uses to gamble secretly at the Del Mar racetrack. SIMON: The book opens with a beautiful scene at the Heyday Lounge in San Diego among a group of guys who play the ponies and then that's when we meet Muriel the waitress who's overhearing them. 'On Swift Horses' is the novel by Shannon Pufahl, who joins us now from the studios of KAZU in Pacific Grove, Calif. 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. Shannon Pufahl began a novel the year that her grandmother died.

On swift horses a novel