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Author Tea Obreht

in conversation with Robin Beth Schaer

Join us when author Tea Obreht visits to discuss her latest novel, The Morningside.

About the author:

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, was an instant bestseller, 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.

In The Morningside, 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. Sil 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 she lives in is now half-underwater. She 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 Sil’s lonely and impoverished reality.

Enchanted by Ena’s stories, Sil 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. Sil’s mission to unravel the truth about this woman’s life, and her own haunted past, may end up costing her everything.

Téa Obreht will be in conversation with Robin Beth Schaer, a poet and essayist who teaches writing in Ohio. She worked as a deckhand aboard the Tall Ship Bounty, a 180-foot ship lost in Hurricane Sandy. Her first book of poetry is Shipbreaking, and her work has appeared in Tin House, Bomb Magazine, Paris Review, Denver Quarterly, Washington Square, and Guernica, among others.

Books will be available for purchase courtesy of Mac's Backs - Books on Coventry.