The Tiger's Wife

Téa Obreht, the youngest of The New Yorker's twenty finest American fiction writers under forty, has written a timeless book that will solidify her place among the most dynamic, inventive writers of her age. She has done so by skillfully weaving a latticework of family mythology, grief, and love.

After years of strife, a young doctor named Natalia comes to an orphanage by the sea on a mission of compassion in a Balkan nation. She senses ancient traditions and secrets accumulating all around her by the time she and her longstanding friend Zóra start immunizing the kids there. secrets her ostentatiously happy hosts have decided not to divulge to her. Secrets about the weird family searching the nearby vineyards for anything. Enigmas concealed inside the terrain itself.

However, Natalia is also having to face a painful, personal mystery of her own: the mysterious circumstances behind her grandfather's untimely death. He told her grandma he was off to see Natalia, but instead he went to a run-down village no one in the family had ever heard of, and he perished there by himself. Her grandpa was a well-known doctor, and he must have realized he was too sick to go. It becomes a puzzle for Natalia to solve why he left home.

She looks to the tales her grandpa told her as a youngster, seeking answers to his last mental condition, overcome with grief. He used to read to her from a well-worn copy of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, which he always carried with him, on their weekly trips to the zoo. Later, he told her stories about his own years-long encounters with "the deathless man," a wanderer who professed to be immortal and seemed to never age. The most remarkable tale, however, is the one Natalia has to learn for herself—the one her grandpa never told her. His boyhood town was snowbound one winter during World War II, blocked off even from the German invaders advancing on it. However, the community was plagued by another, more menacing presence: a tiger that approached steadily under cover of darkness. As Natalia learns, "these stories run like secret rivers through all the other stories" about her grandpa. Ultimately, she will discover the solution she seeks among these opulent, complex stories.