The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht (Orion), is narrated by Natalia, a young doctor who is touring orphanages during the aftermath of a recent Balkan war. Her job, as she puts it, is to "sanitise children orphaned by our own soldiers" in places where deep, often unspoken tensions linger over simple questions like how to spell your surname; clues which might reveal whose side of the conflict you were on. When she receives news of her beloved grandfather's death in mysterious circumstances, she becomes determined to find out why he died; or, more precisely, what he was searching for when he passed away.


Piecing together fragments of the stories he told her when she was a child, she realises that he may have been trying to find the "deathless man" he once mentioned: a vagrant who seemed to be immortal. And all of this appears somehow connected to a tiger who escaped from a zoo in 1941 and came to live in Galina, her grandfather's village, as well as the silent woman who became known as the "tiger's wife" when the animal started his nocturnal visits to the village. As a young boy, her grandfather became fascinated by the tiger: both he and the tiger's wife seemed to share the understanding that, unlike the cruel, predatory tigers of adventures like The Jungle Book, this one was "concrete, lonely, different."

As the narrator herself admits, "many of the people telling you the story can't have been alive when it happened, and then it becomes clear that they have all been telling each other different stories, too".

Obreht threads together echoes of community gossip and folklore, vividly evoking the claustrophobic atmosphere of a small village, and the feelings of fear and hope that become heightened at times of war. This is a tale of many layers: interspersed between the episodic story of the tiger, and Natalia's own quest to find her grandfather's "deathless man," are Natalia's memories of teenage life during the heavy, pregnant pause before the war of the 1990s hit her city, and life after the bombs started falling. It is a poignant, seductive novel, its range all the more impressive given that English is not Yugoslav-born Obreht's first language. And it has been longlisted for the Orange prize.

Mary Fitzgerald