The Tiger's Wife (Orion 20th Anniversary Edition) - Softcover

Tea Obreht

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1780221924 ISBN 13: 9781780221922

Publisher: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2012

Synopsis

Winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction 2011!

'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.

From fragments of stories her grandfather told her as a child, Natalia realises he may have died searching for 'the deathless man', a vagabond who was said to be immortal. Struggling to understand why a man of science would undertake such a quest, she stumbles upon a clue that will lead her to a tattered copy of The Jungle Book, and then to the extraordinary story of the tiger's wife.

About this title

Review:

Téa 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))

Book Description:

A Special Edition of the stunning Orange Prize-winning debut by Tea Obreht

About this edition

• Publisher: Weidenfeld and Nicholson
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1780221924
• ISBN 13: 9781780221922
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352