The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht

A young doctor named Natalia leaves her work at an orphanage to go to the hospital where her grandfather had just died. Her goals were to retrieve his personal items and to find out more about the circumstances of his death. Along the way she reflects on the tales her grandfather had told her, especially one about a deaf-mute woman who befriended a tiger which had escaped from a zoo. There is a good dose of magical realism in the story her grandfather had told her about a man who could not die. These stories are sometimes hard to follow and don't seem to relate to each other very well. The writing is very clever and evocative, but this reader was left confused and somewhat turned off by this novel even though it was a finalist for the National Book Award and named one of the best books of 2011 by several publications.