Arizona, 1893. Dans son ranch, Nora attend désespérément le retour de son époux parti chercher de l'eau tout en apaisant les craintes de son plus jeune fils, convaincu qu'une bête mystérieuse rôde sur leur domaine. En parallèle, Lurie, vagabond orphelin recherché par les autorités, accepte une mission insolite : traverser la Californie à dos de chameau. Les existences de Nora et de Lurie finiront par se télescoper lors d'une improbable rencontre dans un décor spectaculaire de beauté.
Un somptueux roman qui ravive le genre du western, et questionne de manière unique les fondations de l'Amérique.
Dans un pays des Balkans qui se remet d'un siècle de guerres, Natalia est chargée de vacciner les pensionnaires d'un orphelinat. Autour d'elle, tout n'est que superstitions. Les épidémies seraient des malédictions, les morts, des forces vives. Natalia rattache ces croyances absurdes aux contes que lui a transmis son grand-père. Mais l'histoire la plus extraordinaire, celle de la femme du tigre, il l'a emportée dans la tombe. En confrontant présent, souvenirs et légendes, Natalia comprendra les errements des générations passées, et les travers de la sienne. Téa Obreht passe avec virtuosité d'une strate de temps à l'autre, d'un récit et d'un lieu à l'autre pour composer ce roman d'une intelligence et d'une beauté lumineuses sur les pouvoirs de la fable. Son premier roman révèle une adresse narrative, un souffle et une profondeur qui la placent d'emblée au-dessus d'écrivains plus aguerris. Raphaëlle Leyris, Le Monde des livres.
After being expelled from their ancestral home in a not-so-distant future, Silvia and her mother finally settle at the Morningside, a crumbling luxury tower in a place called Island City where Silvia's aunt Ena serves as the superintendent. Silvia feels unmoored in her new life because her mother has been so diligently secretive about their family's past, and because the once-vibrant city where she lives is now half-underwater. Silvia knows almost nothing about the place where she was born and spent her early years, nor does she fully understand why she and her mother had to leave. But in Ena there is an opening: a person willing to give the young girl glimpses into the folktales of her demolished homeland, a place of natural beauty and communal spirit that is lacking in Silvia's lonely and impoverished reality.
Enchanted by Ena's stories, Silvia begins seeing the world with magical possibilities and becomes obsessed with the mysterious older woman who lives in the penthouse of the Morningside. Bezi Duras is an enigma to everyone in the building: She has her own elevator entrance and leaves only to go out at night and walk her three massive hounds, often not returning until the early morning. Silvia's mission to unravel the truth about this woman's life, and her own haunted past, may end up costing her everything.
Startling, inventive, and profoundly moving, The Morningside is a novel about the stories we tell-and the stories we refuse to tell-to make sense of where we came from and who we hope we might become.
Remembering childhood stories her grandfather once told her, young physician Natalia becomes convinced that he spent his last days searching for "the deathless man," a vagabond who claimed to be immortal. As Natalia struggles to understand why her grandfather, a deeply rational man would go on such a farfetched journey, she stumbles across a clue that leads her to the extraordinary story of the tiger's wife.
