Books that make you go "Oooooh!"

The UK version of  
The Tiger's Wife  (Orion Books, 2011)

Well, I love books. Guilty! But you probably know that already, even though this blog is just kicking off. However, there are some books that I love really, really much. Those are the books I want to hug to my chest while caressing their covers. They are the books I would like to climb into or to wrap around me like a comfort blanket because they are so freakin' good - no - great!

One of these is a novel I just finished: Téa Obreht's The Tiger's Wife. I admit that I actually passed it in the bookshop several times, thinking "naah, not for me". Then a colleague gave me his copy and I was hooked from the very first page. The Tiger's Wife is the story of Natalia, a young doctor in former Yugoslavia, and the special relationship she had with her grandfather. The book is a matryoshka-like collection of stories (and fragments thereof) which Natalia's granddad told her, interspersed with her own quest of unravelling the mysteries of his death.

If you haven't read this yet, you definitely should. Both in my private life and in my job I come across a very large number of books every year, but this one definitely stood out! It is eloquent, poetic, poignant and full of clever images. Obreht won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction with this debut - a more than well-deserved award. Personally, I can't wait for her second book, but it will definitely be hard to top this one.