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Random House
March 2011
On Sale: March 8, 2011
352 pages
ISBN: 0385343833
EAN: 9780385343831
Hardcover
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Fiction
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 weeklytrips 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.
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