The Tiger’s Wife / Téa Obreht

This fascinating novel is hard to put down, even though it’s a sort of an unclassifiable collection of stories, history, points of view, politics, with a lot of magical realism thrown in. It’s set in Yugoslavia in the first half of the 20th century and also in the new states that came out of the disintegrated former Yugoslavia. So maybe the structure of the novel reflects the complex Balkan kaleidoscope in which it is set. The writing is wonderful and the storytelling the same. An intriguing glimpse into a part of Europe that I know relatively little about. The Tiger’s Wife won the 2011 Orange Prize, and Obreht was the youngest author to have won the award.

A passage on the effects of war in the former Yugoslavia:

The war had altered everything. Once separate, the pieces that made up our old county no longer carried the same characteristics that had formerly represented their respective parts of the whole. Previously shared things—landmarks, writers, scientists, histories—had to be doled out according to their new owners. The Nobel Prize-winner was no longer ours, but theirs; we named our airport after our crazy inventor, who was no longer a communal figure. And all the while we told ourselves that everything would eventually return to normal. p161

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And the Mountains Echoed / Khaled Hosseini

The latest book by the author of The Kite Runner reads like a collection of short stories, but they are all interconnected. The link between stories isn’t always immediately apparent and there are some diversions that take the reader far from Kabul, and sometimes confusingly so (the detour to Greece was interesting, but a bit disconnected from the rest of the storyline, I thought). There were some great narratives—one in particular that I think was worth the whole of the book— a story about Afghani-American cousins, Idris and Timur, who return to Kabul to attempt to regain an ancestral home, abandoned after the Soviet invasion. While Timur goes out and carouses and flaunts his American wealth, Idris spends most of his time showing charity to a young girl in hospital, a victim of an unspeakable act of violence which leaves her in need of surgery in a western nation. Idris, himself a doctor, promises to arrange the needed medical intervention, but when he returns to the US, the...

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This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.

The Silent Patient / Alex Michaelides

A woman viciously murders her seemingly doting husband. We meet up with her several years later in a mental facility, where a therapist tries to get her to speak and to reveal her story. Who is innocent and who is the victim? The answer isn’t straightforward. The resolution to the novel features a real twist that will have the reader questioning the chronology of the different narrative threads in the book. A real page-turner.

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