Riveting Reads: The Best Fiction of 2011
Our favorite novels of the year—and why we loved them. Plus, be sure to see the best nonfiction books of 2011 and seven more books we loved this year.
Plus: Be sure to see
the best nonfiction books of 2011 and
seven more books we loved this year.
Photo: Philip Friedman/Studio D
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The Tiger's Wife
By Tea Obreht
352 pages;
Random House
When her grandfather dies far from home under mysterious circumstances, Natalia sets off on two life-changing journeys: one across her homeland, the former Yugoslavia, and another into her family's history, revisiting stories that her grandfather used to tell her. As long-hidden secrets come to light, Tea Obreht's The Tiger's Wife (Random House) deftly walks the line between the realistic and the fantastical. Natalia's grandfather was a brilliant doctor and practical man (his motto: "I prepare, I think, I explain") who scoffed at superstition throughout most of his life. Yet his recollections take on the magical sheen of folklore, as in the tale of the "deathless man," a wayfarer who never ages, and another in which a deaf-mute woman grows so attached to a stray tiger that her neighbors believe she's become its wife. These strange and beautiful stories from the past eventually converge with Natalia's present, revealing oddly comforting truths about death, belief in the impossible, and the art of letting go. In Obreht's expert hands, the novel's mythology, while rooted in a foreign world, comes to be somehow familiar, like the dark fairy tales of our own youth, the kind that spooked us into reading them again and again.
— Stephan Lee
Published 02/23/2011