'Having sifted through everything I have heard about the tiger and his wife, I can tell you that this much is fact: in April of 1941, without declaration or warning, the German bombs started falling over the city and did not stop for three days. The tiger did not know that they were bombs...' A tiger escapes from the local zoo, padding through the ruined streets and onwards, to a ridge above the Balkan village of Galina. His nocturnal visits hold the villagers in a terrified thrall. But for one boy, the tiger is a thing of magic - Shere Khan awoken from the pages of The Jungle Book. Natalia is the granddaughter of that boy. Now a doctor, she is visiting orphanages after another war has devastated the Balkans. On this journey, she receives word of her beloved grandfather's death, far from their home, in circumstances shrouded in mystery.
Tea Obreht is the most thrilling literary discovery in years. -- Colum McCann Beautifully executed, haunting and lyrical, The Tiger's Wife is an ambitious novel that succeeds on all counts. It's a book you will want to read again and again. THE INDEPENDENT The brilliant black comedy and matryoshka-style narrative are among the novel's great joys...Obreht has prodigious talent for storytelling and imagery -- Kapka Kassabova THE GUARDIAN Obreht's landscape hovers half in and half out of fable - where villagers who daily risk being hoisted by landmines also fear malign spirits, tigers' brides and men who transform into bears...It's a part of the world that Obreht has made her imagination's own: raucous and strange and gorgeous and rather haunting. This is a pretty formidable first novel. Here be tigers. -- Sam Leith FINANCIAL TIMES varied, poignant and beguilingly fantastical...The Tiger's Wife is an exciting, fast-paced and mystical novel that'll have you rushing to the end. TIME OUT (LONDON) One of the most extraordinary debut novels of recent memory...A gorgeous farrago of stories in which realism collides with myth, superstition with empirical fact, and allegory with history...Obreht elides the sentimental Chagall villages that other writers have made of Eastern Europe, crafting instead something far more ambitious, and universal: an apotheosis of storytelling as a bulwark against brutality - and a balm for grief VOGUE (USA)
Winner of Orange Prize for Fiction 2011. Shortlisted for Dylan Thomas Prize 2011 and Galaxy National Book Awards: International Author of the Year 2011.
Title: The tiger's wife
Subtitle:
Contributors:
By (author)
Tea Obreht
ISBN 13: 9781780221922
ISBN 10: 1780221924
Publisher: Orion Publishing Co
Imprint: Phoenix (an Imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd )
Publication Date: 24/04/2012
Place of Publication:
London,
United Kingdom
Edition:
BIC Subjects:
Modern fiction
NBS Classification: General & Literary Fiction
Dewey Classification:
813.6
(DC23)
Format: Paperback
Pages: 352
Height: 198mm
Width: 129mm
Thickness: 25mm
Weight: 328g