Description

The Tiger's Wife is set in an unnamed Balkan country, in the present and half a century ago, and features a young doctor's relationship with her grandfather and the stories he tells her, primarily about the 'deathless man' who meets him several times in different places and never changes, and a deaf-mute girl from his childhood village who befriends a tiger that has escaped from a zoo. It was largely written while she was at Cornell, and excerpted in The New Yorker in June 2009. Asked to summarize it by a university journalist, Obreht replied, "It?s a family saga that takes place in a fictionalized province of the Balkans. It?s about a female narrator and her relationship to her grandfather, who?s a doctor. It?s a saga about doctors and their relationships to death throughout all these wars in the Balkans." Téa Obreht (born Tea Bajraktarevic; on 30 September 1985) is an American novelist of Bosniak and Slovene ethnicity who was born in Belgrade, the capital of the then-still-existing Yugoslavia. Her debut novel, The Tiger's Wife (2011), won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction. 2011.