Title: The Tiger's Wife

Author: Téa Obreht

Publisher: Random House

It's a story of secrets and superstitions, of magic and mystery . . . but ultimately, it's a story of death. Actually, "story" may be a misnomer. The Tiger's Wife is more a collection of stories, tangled up and woven together with the thinnest of threads.

The tales are loosely tied by Natalia, a young doctor in an unspecified Balkan country. Natalia and a fellow doctor are on a mission of mercy on the other side of a border recently redrawn by yet another war. Or, as she puts it, "to sanitize children orphaned by our own soldiers." Finally reaching a pay phone, she calls home to find that her beloved grandfather has died far from home. He told his wife and daughter he was on his way to meet Natalia. She knows better; he was going to meet the deathless man.

"Everything necessary to understand my grandfather," she tells us, "lies between two stories: the story of the tiger's wife, and the story of the deathless man. These stories run like secret rivers through all the other stories in his life."

They're stories that take time and many, many tangents to tell. It's as if the author spent so much time creating back stories for each character she can't bear not to share them all. Each is interesting in its own way, but they do make for a meandering read. The book feels like a collection of campfire stories; it might be best to take it one section at a time, with breaks in between, rather than straight from cover to cover.

You're wondering about the deathless man and the tiger's wife, aren't you? They're connected only by Natalia's grandfather and his battered copy of The Jungle Book. The tiger's wife of the title was a deaf mute married to a brutal butcher in an arrangement akin to the Old Testament story of Rachel and Leah. After a city zoo is bombed, a tiger escapes and eventually makes his way to the remote village where the unhappy couple lives. The wife befriends the tiger; she and Natalia's grandfather (a child at the time) are the only ones in the village not out for the creature's blood. It does not end well, but then precious little does in these pages.

Natalia's grandfather grows up to encounter the deathless man on several occasions. This mysterious but affable vagabond apparently cannot be killed. His self-imposed job is to travel around collecting newly-dead souls so they don't get lost during the "forty days of the soul" that follow their demise. He wins the grandfather's copy The Jungle Book in a wager, but is willing to wait to collect it. Did he come to claim his prize in the end? Maybe . . . maybe not. Like so much in this story, it's murky.

Obreht has been named by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty and included in the National Book Foundation's list of "5 Under 35." This is her debut novel; it's richly layered, lushly worded, and fascinating in a death-obsessed sort of way. Not something I'd recommend to anyone prone to depression, but a mesmerizing work all the same.

*This Article First Published 3/21/2011