Belgrade-born Téa Obreht’s first novel, The Tiger’s Wife (2011), set against the landscape of the former Yugoslavia, blended myth, village life, wartime strife and deep grandfather-granddaughter love into a marvel that won her the Orange Prize for Fiction at the age of twenty-five. Her follow-up, Inland (2019), brought her magic touch to parallel tales of two characters adrift in the ghostly desert of frontier-era Arizona where it’s “hard to distinguish waking from dreaming.” The Morningside (2024) imagines a young eleven-year-old and her mother, displaced by war “Back Home,” living in a mostly empty thirty-three-story apartment building in a flood-ravaged Island City, trying to find a way forward.
Her new novel reinvents the Western crime novel, wrapping together stories from 2024, 2003 and 1902, with characters ping-ponging off each other, surprises at every turn.
The opening lines to Sunrise are gripping:
Now you see her. From above, she’s a dark speck against darker water. Head, shoulders, occasional hands. Below, her legs are churning , flashes in the green. She’s fighting the chaos of the moment, the sense that she’s been teleported into this cold horror. For now, she’s still screaming. Grabbing at empty space as her clothes continue to swell with water. Her brain is convinced her feet will eventually find ground. They won’t—she’s almost half a mile from land, and the lake, where she’s fallen, is over four hundred feet deep. In a minute or two she’ll realize the broad strokes of all this and slow her thrashing.
