Téa Obreht is the internationally bestselling author of The Tiger’s Wife, which won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her second novel, Inland, won the Southwest Book Award, and was a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and Zoetrope: All-Story, among many other publications. Originally from the former Yugoslavia, Obreht now resides in Wyoming.
Here, Téa Obreht is joined in conversation by Random House VP & Director of Publicity Maria Braeckel as they discuss her new book, The Morningside. This inventive novel takes readers to a not-so-distant future, in which Silvia and her mother have been expelled from their ancestral home and settle at the Morningside, a crumbling luxury tower in a place called Island City. Silvia’s aunt Ena serves as the superintendent: 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.
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.
