NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • NEW YORK
TIMES BESTSELLER
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Wall
Street Journal • O: The Oprah Magazine • The Economist • Vogue
• Slate • Chicago Tribune • The Seattle Times • Dayton
Daily News • Publishers Weekly • Alan Cheuse, NPR's All
Things Considered
SELECTED ONE OF THE TOP 10 BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Michiko
Kakutani, The New York Times • Entertainment Weekly • The
Christian Science Monitor • The Kansas City Star • Library
Journal
Weaving a brilliant latticework of family legend, loss, and love,
Téa Obreht, the youngest of The New Yorker's twenty best
American fiction writers under forty, has spun a timeless novel
that will establish her as one of the most vibrant, original
authors of her generation.
In a Balkan country mending from years of conflict, Natalia, a
young doctor, arrives on a mission of mercy at an orphanage by the
sea. By the time she and her lifelong friend Zóra begin to
inoculate the children there, she feels age-old superstitions and
secrets gathering everywhere around her. Secrets her outwardly
cheerful hosts have chosen not to tell her. Secrets involving the
strange family digging for something in the surrounding vineyards.
Secrets hidden in the landscape itself.
But Natalia is also confronting a private, hurtful mystery of
her own: the inexplicable circumstances surrounding her beloved
grandfather's recent death. After telling her grandmother that he
was on his way to meet Natalia, he instead set off for a ramshackle
settlement none of their family had ever heard of and died there
alone. A famed physician, her grandfather must have known that he
was too ill to travel. Why he left home becomes a riddle Natalia is
compelled to unravel.
Grief struck and searching for clues to her grandfather's final
state of mind, she turns to the stories he told her when she was a
child. On their weeklytrips to the zoo he would read to her from a
worn copy of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, which he
carried with him everywhere; later, he told her stories of his own
encounters over many years with "the deathless man," a vagabond who
claimed to be immortal and appeared never to age. But the most
extraordinary story of all is the one her grandfather never told
her, the one Natalia must discover for herself. One winter during
the Second World War, his childhood village was snowbound, cut off
even from the encroaching German invaders but haunted by another,
fierce presence: a tiger who comes ever closer under cover of
darkness. "These stories," Natalia comes to understand, "run like
secret rivers through all the other stories" of her grandfather's
life. And it is ultimately within these rich, luminous narratives
that she will find the answer she is looking for.
