THE TIGER’S WIFE


It has taken many years, but in the first decade of the 21st century, a separated peace has come to the Balkans. The area has settled into so many nation-states, but the legacy of centuries of turmoil continues. This dichotomy, the crashing confrontation between generations-old traditions and the bleak emptiness of modernity, provides the tension that laces Téa Obreht’s lyrical and transporting début novel, The Tiger’s Wife. Time turns in on itself as the narrator, a young doctor, tries to come to terms with the loss of her grandfather and the fractured world in which she lives. Tales long past are recounted as Natalia revisits the two intensely personal legends that haunted her grandfather’s life, winding her way along the circular path of human existence. History intrudes on the present when Natalia deserts her best friend and fellow aid-worker and seeks out the remote clinic her grandfather visited to die in an attempt to understand his shadowy past. Obreht, whose short stories have appeared in The New Yorker and The Atlantic, sketches tableaux of haunted valleys and snow-heavy forests with effortless grace and aching simplicity. She puzzles through the ambiguities of time and the nature of belief, summoning up a hypnotizing mixture of memory and dream.

The Tiger’s Wife is out now from Random House

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