The Tiger's Wife

From Barnes & Noble

Set in an unnamed Balkan country, this National Book Award finalist has won praise for its "magical-realist evocation of a country in wartime" and its' "dizzyingly nuanced, yet crisp, muscularly written narrative." Widely acclaimed in hardcover; now a trade paperback and NOOK Book.

From the Publisher

“Stunning . . . a richly textured and searing novel.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“Spectacular . . . [Téa Obreht] spins a tale of such marvel and magic in a literary voice so enchanting that the mesmerized reader wants her never to stop. [Grade:] A”—Entertainment Weekly

“[Obreht] has a talent for subtle plotting that eludes most writers twice her age, and her descriptive powers suggest a kind of channeled genius. . . . No novel [this year] has been more satisfying.”—The Wall Street Journal 
 
“Filled with astonishing immediacy and presence, fleshed out with detail that seems firsthand, The Tiger’s Wife is all the more remarkable for being the product not of observation but of imagination.”—The New York Times Book Review
 
“That The Tiger’s Wife never slips entirely into magical realism is part of its magic. . . . Its graceful commingling of contemporary realism and village legend seems even more absorbing.”—The Washington Post
 
“So rich with themes of love, legends and mortality that every novel that comes after it this year is in peril of falling short in comparison with its uncanny beauty.”—Time

“Mesmerizing . . . [Tea] Obreht’s striking ability to explain the world through stories is matched by her patience with the parts of life—and death—that endlessly confound us.”—The Boston Globe

“Makes for a thrilling beginning to what will certainly be a great literary career.”—Elle

“A compelling, persuasive writer, Obreht brings improbable elements to life on the page. Better, she makes them snap together with such magical skill that even the skeptical reader believes.”—Chicago Sun-Times

“In Obreht’s expert hands, the novel’s mythology, while rooted in a foreign world, comes to be somehow familiar, like the dark fairy tales of our own youth, the kind that spooked us into reading them again and again.”—O: The Oprah Magazine

“Obreht writes with an angel’s pen . . . creating a skein of descriptive passages flush with apt details and ringing with lyrical diction about city life, country life, private dreams and public difficulties.”—NPR’s “All Things Considered”

“Gorgeous . . . one of the most extraordinary debut novels in recent memory.”—Vogue

“Every word, every scene, every thought is blazingly alive in this many-faceted, spellbinding, and rending novel of death, succor, and remembrance.”—Booklist (starred review)

“A spectacular accomplishment . . . written in a wry, classical, luxuriant style reminiscent of Tolstoy.”—Marie Claire

Ron Charles

Tea Obreht's swirling first novel…draws us beneath the clotted tragedies in the Balkans to deliver the kind of truth that histories can't touch. Born in Belgrade in 1985…she captures the thirst for consecration that a century of war has left in that bloody part of the world. It's a novel of enormous ambitions that manages in its modest length to contain the conflicts between Christians and Muslims, Turks and Ottomans, science and superstition.
—The Washington Post

Michiko Kakutani

Ms. Obreht…writes with remarkable authority and eloquence, and she demonstrates an uncommon ability to move seamlessly between the gritty realm of the real and the more primary-colored world of the fable. It's not so much magical realism in the tradition of Gabriel García Márquez or Günter Grass as it is an extraordinarily limber exploration of allegory and myth making and the ways in which narratives (be they superstitions, cultural beliefs or supernatural legends) reveal—and reflect back—the identities of individuals and communities: their dreams, fears, sympathies and hatreds…Ms. Obreht has not only made a precocious debut, but she has also written a richly textured and searing novel.
—The New York Times

Liesl Schillinger

…Obreht juxtaposes Natalia's matter-of-fact narration with contemporary folk tales that are as simple, enthralling and sometimes brutal as fables by Kipling or Dinesen…she did not live in the former Yugoslavia during the war-torn years this book revisits. Filled with astonishing immediacy and presence, fleshed out with detail that seems firsthand, The Tiger's Wife is all the more remarkable for being the product not of observation but of imagination. For Obreht, the mind's witness is more than equal to the eye's. And her narrator, in retelling the experiences of her grandfather's generation, enfolds them into her own. As his vision joins hers, old and new memories collide in a vibrant collage that has no date, no dateline.
—The New York Times Book Review

Publishers Weekly

Obreht, named last year as one of the New Yorker's 20 novelists to watch under the age of 40, makes her debut with this magical-realist evocation of a country in wartime. The author, herself an immigrant to the U.S. from the former Yugoslavia, transforms a young woman's memories of her grandfather's stories into a kaleidoscopic portrait of her former country's traumatic history. The book is read in tag-team fashion by Susan Duerden and Robin Sachs. Sachs sounds gravelly, grouchy, and well-pickled in various alcoholic libations; Duerden is British, plummy, arch, and delicate in her intonations, reverberating into near-Cockney working-class tone. The unlikely combination is surprisingly pleasing, nicely matching the contrast between Obreht's elaborate storytelling conceit and its grubby, homely details. A Random hardcover. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

The sometimes crushing power of myth, story, and memory is explored in the brilliant debut of Obreht, the youngest of the New Yorker's 20-under-40. Natalia Stefanovi, a doctor living (and, in between suspensions, practicing) in an unnamed country that's a ringer for Obreht's native Croatia, crosses the border in search of answers about the death of her beloved grandfather, who raised her on tales from the village he grew up in, and where, following German bombardment in 1941, a tiger escaped from the zoo in a nearby city and befriended a mysterious deaf-mute woman. The evolving story of the tiger's wife, as the deaf-mute becomes known, forms one of three strands that sustain the novel, the other two being Natalia's efforts to care for orphans and a wayward family who, to lift a curse, are searching for the bones of a long-dead relative; and several of her grandfather's stories about Gavran Gailé, the deathless man, whose appearances coincide with catastrophe and who may hold the key to all the stories that ensnare Natalia. Obreht is an expert at depicting history through aftermath, people through the love they inspire, and place through the stories that endure; the reflected world she creates is both immediately recognizable and a legend in its own right. Obreht is talented far beyond her years, and her unsentimental faith in language, dream, and memory is a pleasure. (Mar.)

Library Journal

In the torn-up Balkans, as medic Natalia is preparing to cross what was once not a border to help vaccinate orphans, she learns that her distinguished physician grandfather has died in an obscure clinic not far from where she's going. No one knows what he was doing there, though Natalia does know he was seriously ill. This incident opens up Obreht's dizzyingly nuanced yet crisp, muscularly written narrative by allowing Natalia to introduce two stories (fables? truth?) that her grandfather related to her. One concerns the "deathless man" her grandfather sometimes encountered, who collected the souls of the dead. The other concerns a tiger that escaped from the zoo during World War II and made its way to the village where her grandfather lived as a boy. Attempts to kill the tiger fail, but the butcher's abused, deaf-mute wife seems mystically connected to the great beast, rousing the villagers' fear and anger. That tiger—and others seen later at the zoo—looms here as a symbol of defiant, struggling hope as the deathless man continues his task. VERDICT Demanding one's full attention, this complex, humbling, and beautifully crafted debut from one of The New Yorker's 20 Under 40 is highly recommended for anyone seriously interested in contemporary fiction. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/10.]—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

The Barnes & Noble Review

Téa Obreht's fame was virtually assured even before publication of The Tiger's Wife, her first novel. Excerpts of the book appearing in The New Yorker created a stir and earned her inclusion in that magazine's "20 Under 40" list of fiction writers. Now we finally have the book in its entirety.

Encapsulating The Tiger's Wife in a single phrase or sentence is impossible. This is a novel in name only, for it comprises an array of widely different tales held together by the flimsiest of conceits, that of the narrator recalling the eventful life and times of her late grandfather. The tales themselves prove individually luscious, though not without an unpleasant cumulative effect. It may strike some as a cavil, but the plain truth is that The Tiger's Wife, while certainly entertaining and of considerable literary merit, is too rich for its own good: Obreht would have been well-advised to parcel out its constituent elements as stand-alone stories.

Narrated by a young pediatrician named Natalia, the story takes place in an unnamed land clearly modeled after the former Yugoslavia, where Obreht was born and spent her early childhood. In between her current project of inoculating disadvantaged orphans against disease -- "The wails of children in distress are monstrously contagious: the moment one child strikes up, six more follow it" -- Natalia's thoughts drift to her recently deceased grandfather, a prominent surgeon, and his adventuresome life. "Everything necessary to understand my grandfather," she muses, "lies between two stories: the story of the tiger's wife, and the story of the deathless man. These stories run like secret rivers through all the other stories in his life."

And so begins the series of rollicking, meandering, and at times briefly intersecting tales making up this novel, with Natalia alternating between recounting episodes from her grandfather's life and others from hers, some of which also feature her grandfather. In a book brimming with arresting yet overly colorful characters, some tinged with specks of magic realism, the tiger's wife herself stands out both for her gravitas and her believability. A lonely deaf-mute married to an abusive butcher in an isolated mountain village, she is given her derogatory moniker during the Second World War. Her apparent affection for a tiger that has escaped the zoo in the country's bomb-flattened capital and now roams the mountain forests prompts salacious and hostile gossip on the part of the villagers, who eventually decide to kill the majestic creature. Natalia's grandfather, a child enamored of Kipling's The Jungle Book and determined to protect the tiger from the frenzied villagers, forges a bond with the battered but stoic and immensely dignified woman spurned by almost everyone else.

Obreht's storytelling impulse is so powerful that she cannot help devising extensive background histories for a host of secondary characters. These tangents distract attention from the main narrative, but often prove intriguing and contain some of the book's most enduring images. In the later chapters devoted to the tiger's wife, for example, Darisa the Bear enters the picture. Before he became a renowned hunter and outstanding taxidermist, Darisa spent many nights of his childhood practicing a crude form of the craft he would later master. Unable to sleep for fear death would pounce and claim his sickly older sister, Darisa tried to lure the Grim Reaper to the cellar, where he labored nightly to restore the appearance of dead cats and other small animals. "If he kept Death there," figured Darisa, "kept it riveted and preoccupied, thought about it while it shared the cellar with him, it would not wander the house."

Natalia's grandfather also grapples with death, but in the form of a deathless man who crosses paths with him at several points in his life. The encounters between the two are predictably strange and surreal, though also surprisingly poignant, none more so than a dinner in a deserted restaurant in a Muslim city called Sarobor about to be pummeled by enemy militia. Obreht is likely thinking of the agonizing Siege of Sarajevo, and Natalia's grandfather, a Christian married to a Muslim from Sarobor, wonders if his time has finally come as he chats with the deathless man over a plate of John Dory fish.

Death, of course, is precisely what the world associated with Yugoslavia in the 1990s, due to a series of brutal wars that involved numerous massacres of civilians. In those sections of The Tiger's Wife revolving around Natalia's teens and early adulthood, when her country splits into several, Obreht memorably depicts the terror, absurdity, and tedium of war. Natalia emerges from these experiences a tough but contemplative woman, and her observations on the nature of conflict are profound:

When your fight has purpose -- to free you from something, to interfere on the behalf of an innocent -- it has a hope of finality. When the fight is about unraveling -- when it is about your name, the places to which your blood is anchored, the attachment of your name to some landmark or event -- there is nothing but hate, and the long, slow progression of people who feed on it and are fed it, meticulously, by the ones who come before them. Then the fight is endless, and comes in waves and waves, but always retains its capacity to surprise those who hope against it.

If The Tiger's Wife represents the literary exuberance of a young writer -- Obreht is in her mid-twenties -- the author's future novels may well be more restrained, without losing their luster. Indeed, based on what is on display here, it is difficult to imagine that Obreht will ever grow stingy when it comes to augmenting her central narrative with enchanting subplots and secondary storylines. And that's fine: if Obreht narrows her focus and curtails her embellishments, her undeniable flair for storytelling could produce a magnificent novel. Until then, The Tiger's Wife will seduce and confound, fascinate and exasperate.

--Rayyan Al-Shawaf