Author Earns Her Stripes on First Try

Charles McGrath - New York Times,
Published: March 14, 2011

Téa Obreht is just 25, and “The Tiger’s Wife” is her first book. It is also the first book ever sold by her agent, Seth Fishman, who is 30, and the second book bought by her editor, Noah Eaker, who was 26 when he acquired it and, strictly speaking, still an editorial assistant.

Béatrice de Géa for The New York Times
Born in Belgrade, Téa Obreht moved to Cyprus, then Egypt, before settling in the United States.

Ms. Obreht was included in The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” list of young fiction authors last summer and “The Tiger’s Wife” was subsequently excerpted in the magazine.
On Sunday, the book made the cover of The New York Times Book Review. Just about everywhere, it has received the sort of reviews that many writers wait an entire career for. In The Times on Friday, Michiko Kakutani called it ‘“hugely ambitious, audaciously written.”

Set in an unnamed Balkan country in the aftermath of a civil war, “The Tiger’s Wife” is narrated by a young physician named Natalia Stefanovic, whose beloved grandfather, also a doctor, has recently died. The story links her efforts in the present to deliver vaccines to children in an orphanage with elaborate folk tales her grandfather used to tell: one involves a deaf and mute woman, abused by her husband, who befriends an escaped tiger in the woods, and another is about a vampirelike character known as the Deathless Man, himself immortal, who brings death to others.

The book begins by describing the ritual visits the narrator and her grandfather made to the zoo when she was young, and in the middle of her book tour last week, Ms. Obreht, who used to visit the zoo in Belgrade with her own grandfather, stopped by the zoo in Central Park, one of her favorite places in New York. She pointed out that the snow leopard and the polar bears had much more space to roam here than they would in Belgrade.

Read the full review at the New York Times.