The Tiger's Wife is the story of one woman's attempt to make sense of her grandfather's final journey. Set in an unnamed Balkan country shortly after civil war, Natalia Stefanovic is a doctor delivering vaccines to orphanages when her grandfather dies hundreds of miles from where he told his family he was heading.
What follows is a patchwork of childhood memories, dreams, folklore and secrets; lived, retold, blurred and kept.
As a child Natalia's first memory is of the tiger's enclosure during a visit to the zoo with her grandfather. "Because I am little," she recalls, "my love for tigers comes directly from him." His comes from The Jungle Book, read as a small boy growing up in the shadow of an earlier war and irrevocably linked with folklore figures, the Tiger's Wife and the Deathless Man. However steeped in science his adult life, these eerie figures continue to define him.
This is Tea Obreht's debut novel. Longlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction and Award for New Writers, it is ambitious and at times seems more an exercise in creative writing than storytelling. The narrative thread is slight, occasionally dipping out of sight. But there is something affecting about this strange tale. It lingers after the final line is read.
