In the Balkans in the years following the war, Natalia is a young doctor reeling from the recent death of her beloved grandfather. As she travels to a small village across the border to administer childhood vaccines, she is also searching to unravel her grandfather’s history. There are two crucial stories that formed him: his encounters with “the deathless man” and the legend of the tiger’s wife.
The novel moves easily between Natalia’s present, her childhood, and her grandfather’s childhood in a village haunted by an escaped tiger. Each of these timelines is overshadowed by war. Obreht mixes historical fact with magic realism in a skilled and delightful manner. What in her grandfather’s stories is truth and what is fiction? What is an accurate portrayal of their country’s history and what is a way of coping with that history’s horrors?
Obreht carefully keeps country and city names off the page. There is reference to “their” side and “our” side and context clues help us guess which is which but the absence of explicit labels is clearly important. Natalia is an adult now but her childhood and youth has been lived almost entirely in the shadow of war. In a parallel manner, so was her grandfather’s and so we slowly realize why the story of the deathless man might be so important. This is, after all, a story about stories. How legends form and why they matter in the face of loss. How they last and how they create us.
There’s definite magic realism here, particularly in the stories told, and I loved the way we never know how much of the stories we are expected to believe or how much Natalia herself believes. This worked for me as a lover of magic realism but it might lose other readers. Personally, I’ll be looking to read Obreht’s next book.
Karissa Reads Books 
I’ve heard of this book, and I remember it being quite popular, so glad it deserves that praise! Has she come out with any books since?
Yes, she has a book called Inland that came out in 2019.
I know this lady became popular for writing a modern Western by a woman, which we haven’t seen much of in a genre dominated by Louis L’Amour.
I didn’t realize that was what her second book is about. Have you read it?
It’s this book: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/53050139
No, I haven’t read it, but now I’m surprised she wrote it because she’s Serbian. You’d think she’d be from Texas and choose to write a western.
I creepily googled where she lives now and her website says Wyoming and that she has worked at the University of Texas previously. So it looks like still a personal connection. Definitely a shift from Serbia!
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