Mary Lou Elson hosts tonight’s meeting of the BUUF Book Club. We’ll be discussing The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obrecht.

Ron Charles of the Washington Post has written the following review:

"Tea Obreht's swirling first novel, The Tiger's Wife, draws us beneath the clotted tragedies in the Balkans to deliver the kind of truth that histories can't touch. Born in Belgrade in 1985 - no, that's not a typo - she captures the thirst for consecration that a century of war has left in that bloody part of the world. It's a novel of enormous ambitions that manages in its modest length to contain the conflicts between Christians and Muslims, Turks and Ottomans, science and superstition. The story, which demands a luxurious stretch of concentration, works on two levels that initially seem unrelated but eventually wind around each other evocatively. In the present day, the narrator is a young doctor named Natalia, who travels 400 miles on a "goodwill mission" to inoculate orphans at a monastery in a town now separated from her home by a new border. Just as she arrives, she gets word that her beloved grandfather, also a physician, has died while coming to help her. His death is not a surprise - she alone knew he had cancer - but the circumstances strike her as odd. Obreht has lived in the United States since she was 12, but she creates a vivid sense of this war-torn region (we're never told exactly where all this is taking place). Her thoughtful narrator must navigate the land mines - literal and political - that still blot the countryside. Natalia's world is a steampunk mingling of modern technology and traditional tools - cellphones and antibiotics alongside picks and poultices."