The Tiger’s Wife weaves Balkan folklore and current events together to tell the story of war from the perspective of a young doctor trying to explain the mysterious circumstances of her grandfather’s death, which lie “between two stories: the story of the tiger’s wife, and the story of the deathless man”. The narration switches between the grandfather’s stories of his childhood and career as a doctor and the present day, as his granddaughter struggles to accept his farewell-less death.
Téa Obreht’s debut novel is known most for what is left unsaid; the reader is constantly left with an incomplete sense of not only what has happened throughout the story, but also the real and unreal. Drawing on her own version of magical realism (she has mentioned García Márquez as one of her inspirations), Obreht gives a fabulous retelling of what is presumed to be the Yugoslav Wars without ever mentioning it by name. She leaves events and meanings tremendously ambiguous so that no sides are chosen; instead, the reader sees how war affects everyone, even as it is only seen as happening in the background of the story.
Obreht grew up in Serbia and immigrated at the age of 12 to the United States, where she has lived ever since, along with frequent visits to Belgrade to see her grandmother. She is the youngest person to have won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, at age 25, and was a National Book Award 5 Under 35 honoree, as well as one of The New Yorker’s best American fiction writers under 40. She has an MFA from Cornell University and currently lives in New York, where she teaches at Hunter College. Her latest novel, Inland, was published in August 2019.