Tea Obreht will appear at Bookshop Santa Cruz on January 13.
Téa Obreht’s first novel had not even been published when she was named one of the 20 best writers under 40 by the New Yorker at the tender age of 24. Those squirrelly Manhattanites were on to something, though—upon its publication nearly a year later, The Tiger’s Wife scooped up the Orange Prize for Fiction and was named a finalist for the National Book Award.
In The Tiger’s Wife, written over three years as she completed an MFA in creative writing at Cornell, Obreht traces a young doctor’s journey to understand the mysterious circumstances of her grandfather’s death. The novel presents deftly woven modern folk tales—stories of the deathless man, of the tiger’s wife—cast against the backdrop of a war-torn Balkan province. Obreht began writing the story just a year after the death of her own grandfather.
“The forty days of the soul begin on the morning after death,” Obreht writes. “That first night, before its forty days begin, the soul lies still against sweated-on pillows and watches the living fold the hands and close the eyes, choke the room with smoke and silence to keep the new soul from the doors and the windows and the cracks in the floor so that it does not run out of the house like a river.”
Téa Bajraktarevic was born in Belgrade, in what was then Yugoslavia, in 1985. War drove Bajraktarevic, her mother and grandfather to Cyprus and then to Cairo before they settled in America. He was on his deathbed, the story goes, when her grandfather requested that she write under his surname, instead of her absent father’s.
Tea Obreht will read from The Tiger’s Wife on Friday, Jan. 13 at 7:30pm at Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz. 831.423.0900. Free.
