Conversation: Tea Obreht, Author of ‘The Tiger’s Wife’

The horrors of the Balkan War and strange encounters with a “deathless man”; the love between a woman and her dying grandfather; the magical story of a tiger terrorizing a European village. This mix of realism and fantasy is all part of “The Tiger’s Wife,” the new, first novel by Tea Obreht, a 25-year-old writer who was born in the former Yugoslavia and came to the United States at age 12.