The Tiger's Wife

'Having sifted through everything I have heard about the tiger and his wife, I can tell you that this much is fact: in April of 1941, without declaration or warning, the German bombs started falling over the city and did not stop for three days. The tiger did not know that they were bombs...'A tiger escapes from Belgrade Zoo, padding through the ruined streets and onwards, to a ridge above the village of Galina. His nocturnal visits hold the villagers in a terrified thrall. But for one boy, the tiger is a thing of magic - Shere Khan awoken from the pages of The Jungle Book. Natalia is the granddaughter of that boy. Now a doctor, she is visiting orphanages after another war has devastated the Balkans. On this journey, she receives word of her beloved grandfather's death, far from their home, in circumstances shrouded in mystery. From fragments of stories her grandfather told her as a child, Natalia realises he may have died searching for 'the deathless man', a vagabond who was said to be immortal. Struggling to understand why a man of science would undertake such a quest, she stumbles upon a clue that will lead her to a tattered copy of The Jungle Book, and then to the extraordinary story of the tiger's wife. The Tiger's Wife is an enrapturing, timeless novel, from a mesmerising new voice.

About The Author:

Tea was born in 1985 in the former Yugoslavia, and raised in Belgrade, where she spent her childhood. In 1992, her family moved to Cyprus, and then to Egypt, where she learned to speak and read English, eventually immigrating to the United States in 1997. Her short story, "The Laugh," is forthcoming in the August 2009 Summer Fiction issue of The Atlantic. She is currently a lecturer at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York.