TIGER'S WIFE, THE by Tea Obreht - SIGNED FIRST EDITION BOOK
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 weekly trips 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.