Our favourite books this year, chosen by Orion editors...

Editor's Choice: Arzu Tahsin chooses The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht

Dear Reader,

This novel heralds a new and potentially explosive literary voice. The youngest writer ever to appear on The New Yorker’s Top 20 Writers Under 40 list, Téa Obreht is a talent to watch and this is even before The Tiger’s Wife is published.

Within a couple of paragraphs of this novel I thought, good god, I’ve found the real thing. By the time I’d finished it I was weeping and this wasn’t because of the story, but because this is such an extraordinary novel. On every single level this book delights and satisfies. Since we acquired it in 2008, barely a day has passed when I haven’t thought about it.

The Tiger’s Wife is set in a Balkan country ravaged by civil bloodshed. Grieving for her grandfather, a young doctor, Natalia, struggles to understand why he left their family to die alone in a field hospital far from home. Growing convinced her grandfather, a prominent physician, was searching for an odd character from his past – a vagabond who called himself ‘the deathless man’ and appeared never to age – she sets out to find him. But the deathless man is only one part of the mystery of her grandfather’s final days. An equally important clue is contained in a worn copy of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, which her grandfather carried with him at all times, and which will lead her to the extraordinary story of the tiger’s wife. What links these two extraordinary strands in her grandfather’s life? And will Natalia’s search to find the meaning lead her to a place where she might also have an extraordinary encounter?

This is a breathtaking read and a story you’ll be loathe to leave, I promise you. Probably, more than any other book I have ever bought, this is the one that I continue to think about, and think about, and think about…

I sincerely hope you share my vision for Téa Obreht and The Tiger’s Wife.

With best wishes,

Arzu Tahsin
Editorial Director, W & N