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Sometime in the not-too-distant future Téa Obreht plans to move to New York City. “That’s where the action is, I guess,” she says, sounding in the same instant both eager and skeptical.

But for now, Obreht lives in Ithaca, New York, where she has remained since finishing her M.F.A. at Cornell two years ago. In Ithaca’s relative calm she has ridden out the hoopla of being named to the New Yorker’s list of the 20 best writers under 40—and at 25, she is the youngest writer on that list. “Ithaca is a nice environment to write in, and I have a community of writers here, so I have stayed,” says Obreht, who is remarkably composed for a young writer cast suddenly into the limelight. “Besides, changing environments in a situation where the book was in final edits wasn’t something I wanted to do.”

“I was interested in the point [that] a story becomes so important to a person that it doesn’t matter if it’s truth or legend.”

The book in question is Obreht’s stirringly accomplished first novel, The Tiger’s Wife. Set in an unnamed country in the Balkans after prolonged civil war, the story is narrated by a young doctor named Natalia as she travels into the borderlands, where emotions about the war are still raw, to deliver medicine to an orphanage. Early in her journey Natalia learns that her grandfather, also a doctor, has died in a remote village while on his own mission of mercy. Her grandmother asks Natalia to retrieve a packet of his belongings. As Natalia travels deeper into the fraught landscape, she unravels the meaning of the two central stories that ran “like secret rivers through all the other stories of [her grandfather’s] life”—the story of his repeated meetings with the deathless man and the story of his childhood experience with the tiger’s wife.

Like her narrator, Obreht was very close to her grandfather. She was born in Belgrade in 1985 and lived there with her grandparents and her mother until 1992, “when things got pretty heated.” As fighting intensified in the former Yugoslavia, her family fled.

“My grandfather was an engineer and he had connections in different places, so we ended up in Cyprus for a year. Then we lived in Cairo for three and a half years until we were lucky enough to come to the United States. A lot of our family lived in a far suburb of Atlanta, so we lived there for two or three years. And then my mother met my stepfather and we moved to Palo Alto.” The summer before she left for Cornell her grandfather died. “He was always very supportive of my decision and desire to write,” she says. On his deathbed he asked her to write under his family name—Obreht—“and now I do.”

Obreht has been writing since the age of eight. As an undergraduate she “went to the University of Southern California to study creative writing, with the full support of my mother. But she also wanted me to have an additional major so I could get an actual job. So I chose art history!” she says, laughing. At USC, Obreht wrote prolifically at first and then stopped for a year. “In any artistic endeavor when you’re just learning something, there comes a moment in your progress when you hit a wall and the wall is simply there. And the only way for that wall or curtain or whatever it is to dissolve is to wait it out.”

Obreht’s wait lasted until her senior year, when she took a workshop with T.C. Boyle. “I suddenly understood there was this whole thing to be done with structure, how it works and looks and what it feels like to read a good short story and understand what makes it good,” she says. “After that, writing for me was the absolute top priority once again and it has remained so.”

The Tiger’s Wife, Obreht says, began as “a terrible short story that took all kinds of beatings in workshops. It failed but there was something I was really attached to and I wasn’t willing to give up on—the tiger. I’ll say without embarrassment that writing the tiger sections was my favorite part of the process. I write out of chronological order. I skip around a lot. But I wanted to stay with his character and go on this journey with him. So those were the parts that got written first.”

As the story grew, Obreht drew first on things she knew from her own life and from stories her relatives told her. Then in the summer of 2009 she went to Serbia and Croatia “to hunt for vampires for Harper’s” (her nonfiction piece appeared in the November 2010 issue of the magazine). “We ended up bumming around a lot of villages in a car with a tape recorder, getting out and asking, ‘Does this village have any vampire stories?’ It ended up being a much-needed lesson in village life, the way village society functions, the way myths operate in a village setting.”

The result of that research is one of the most powerful aspects of The Tiger’s Wife—the novel’s strong sense of place: not merely place as vividly described locale, but place as the location of layers of often conflicting emotion. In the villages Natalia visits, for example, the recent civil war is never discussed, but the sorrow and distrust it has left behind seem to seep out of the earth itself.

Likewise, Obreht’s exploration of folktales and myths adds powerful resonance—and compassion—to her narrative. “I think when people suffer great tragedy, they turn to myths,” Obreht says. “I was interested in the point a story becomes so important to a person that it doesn’t matter if it’s truth or legend. Sometimes the fact that the story exists at all is moving in itself. I think there’s a lot of that where I come from, and a lot of that generally in the world.”

The final thread in the development of The Tiger’s Wife, Obreht says, was her experience of her
grandfather’s death. “I had tried for a long time not to deal with it and not to think about it and say to myself, ‘I’m doing fine. I’m great.’ Then this story started to come together with this narrator who had a grandfather who had died. . . . Maybe this isn’t the right thing to say because we’re talking about writing. But personally in the process of writing this novel I ended up making peace with the fact that my grandfather was dead. I’m not pleased with this [in the sense of] ‘oh, this is an accomplishment,’ but somehow . . . it became a fact that I could process in a way that I hadn’t thought I could do before. The writing of the book got me there, and I’m happy."

Author photo by Beowulf Sheehan.  

Although she’s been writing for years, The Weird Sisters is Eleanor Brown’s first novel, and her joy at being published is almost palpable.

In a birth announcement of sorts, Brown posted a photo of an early copy of the book on her blog and gushed somewhat adorably about its beauty. “The paper is beautiful and doesn’t reproduce quite right in photos—it’s a beautiful pearlescent white that glitters in light,” she wrote.

It’s true—the cover is gorgeous. That’s nothing, though, compared to what’s inside this delicious, wholly original novel.
Brown laughs when teased about her blog post.

“There’s something about seeing the hardcover that just made it all feel very real and very close, and kind of brought home that I’d done something worth celebrating,” Brown says.

Indeed, The Weird Sisters is a book worth celebrating. Because their father is a renowned Shakespearean scholar, the Andreas family communicates largely through the words of the Bard. It is not unusual for them to drop Shakespearean quotes into a conversation about, say, wedding rings or what to eat for breakfast.

The three Andreas sisters—Rosalind, Bianca and Cordelia, each named for great Shakespearean characters—come home to the tiny college town where they grew up when their mother is diagnosed with breast cancer. Rosalind (or Rose) doesn’t have far to go, since she lives and teaches nearby in Columbus. Bianca (or Bean) comes home from her glitzy life in Manhattan after being disgraced at work. And the baby sister, Cordelia (Cordy), wanders home from her latest aimless road trip around America, broke, tired and pregnant.

The novel wonderfully captures how it feels to go home again—and all the bittersweet, mixed emotions that can come along with it. Who hasn’t visited the parents and immediately reverted to a sullen teenager, or been home for the holidays and run into an ex at the grocery store?

“The reason I was interested in the story of the Andreas sisters comes very much from my family in broad strokes,” says Brown, who has two sisters. “When we get back together, we tend to slip back into those roles.”

It’s a meaningful choice of theme for someone like Brown, who has lived all over the world and admits she has a constant longing to find a place where she wants to stay. Brown just moved from Florida to Colorado with her partner, writer J.C. Hutchins. She has also lived in England, Minnesota, Washington, D.C., San Francisco and Philadelphia.

And yet, she admits that someone had to point out to her the dichotomy between her own peripatetic life and the focus on home in her book.

“I did have a psychology undergrad degree,” Brown laughs. “You’d think I would’ve picked up on that!”

Brown came late to Shakespeare, never really a fan until she studied at Oxford and got to see productions at the Globe and Stratford-upon-Avon. “That’s when I really fell in love with the language and stories,” she says.

Telling someone she’s written a book about a family that speaks in Shakespeare quotes causes people “to kind of get that look in their eye, like ‘I didn’t know there was going to be a quiz,’ ” she says. “But really this is about a family that is crippled by the fact that they’re not talking honestly and openly with each other using their own words. Every family has patterns that hold them back.”

In the Andreas’ case, that pattern includes a dad who wanders around the house muttering things like, “Marry, sir, ’tis an ill cook that cannot lick his own fingers: therefore he that cannot lick his fingers goes not with me.”

Huh?

“Here’s one of the problems with communicating in the words of a man who is not around to explain himself: It’s damn hard sometimes to tell what he was talking about,” the sisters say, in the book’s terrific first-person-plural voice. Capturing that voice—in which the sisters collectively tell the story—was no easy feat.

“It was tricky,” Brown says. “I had to kind of devise the rules; for example, how many sisters have to be in the scene to use that voice? Technically, it was really difficult, but I thought it was important because when people talk about their families, they always slip into ‘we.’ ”

So different in personality and life choices, Rose, Bean and Cordy find it complicated to be under one roof again. Bean owes thousands of dollars to her former employer. Rose is engaged to a fellow professor who wants to live in England, while she prefers to stick closer to home. Cordy has no job, no money, no college degree, no health insurance and a rapidly growing belly. How they reconnect—with themselves, each other and their parents—is the heart of this funny, warm story.

It also bears mentioning that The Weird Sisters is a book nerd’s nirvana: The whole family carries books with them wherever they go, and they read at any opportunity. Brown herself knocks off about 300 books in a good year, everything from romance to nonfiction. “Basically, I don’t go anywhere without a book in my hand,” she says.

None of this is surprising: The Weird Sisters is clearly written by a booklover. It’s irresistible and the ending, although satisfying, comes all too soon.

Whether she’s imagining the history of an ancient manuscript, as in People of the Book, or an English town determined to survive the plague in A Year of Wonders, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Geraldine Brooks is a master at bringing history’s little-known but fascinating stories to life.

For her fourth novel, Caleb’s Crossing, she found inspiration close to home: the tale of a Wampanoag boy who became a Harvard graduate. Brooks first learned about Caleb after seeing a notation on a map. “I’m thinking [this happened in] 1965, the Civil Rights era, and when I found out it was 1665, my imagination started spinning,” she says during a call to her home on Martha’s Vineyard, which she shares with her husband, writer Tony Horwitz, and their two sons.

"Whenever anyone says, your women are ahead of their time, I tell them, go and read more 17th-century women!”

But that line on an old map of the island was one of very few records of Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk’s existence. “To tell you the truth, I had a hesitation about creating him too much in full, seeing that we know so little, and I wanted to respect that historical distance with him,” Brooks says.

Instead, she approaches the story through another character: Bethia Mayfield, a minister’s daughter with a hungry mind who has picked up her learning a piece at a time while eavesdropping on the lessons of her older (and less intellectual) brother Makepeace. Bethia meets Caleb while gathering clams on the shores of Martha’s Vineyard, near Gay Head. The daughter of a minister and the granddaughter of the island’s governor, both of whom pride themselves on their good relationships and just dealings with the native tribes, Bethia is less intimidated by an Indian boy her own age than the average colonial girl. When she speaks to him in his language, a friendship is born.

“I don’t remember who said this, but there’s a saying ‘learn another language and you gain another soul.’ I found that very true when I was studying Arabic,” Brooks says. “The way it’s structured and the way the root words have developed give you such insight into the thinking of people. So it was fun to sort of think about that at a time when the English were trying to put their very foreign stamp on the landscape and bring in foreign species and things like this, to think of the original names for things on the island.”

The understanding that Bethia and Caleb develop as a result of their friendship utterly changes their lives. Bethia is fascinated by the shaman of the tribe, Caleb’s uncle, whose rituals are considered the devil’s work by her father. Caleb is eager to adopt the ways of the colonists in order to level the playing field for his people.

Eventually Caleb comes to live with Bethia’s family so he can be tutored by her father; then the two (along with Makepeace and another Wampanoag boy, Joel) go to Cambridge. Their story is narrated by Bethia in a diary written at three different points in her life, though no actual journals by colonial women before 1750 exist.

“There were literate women, certainly,” Brooks says, “but they were just so damn busy! They were working from before sunup to after sundown, and you can imagine how fatiguing that all was. Also paper was very scarce, and the stress was on women reading the Bible but not necessarily writing, so it was a small population that would have found writing easy or pleasurable.”

Bethia, of course, is among that small number. Living in a time when being an intelligent woman carries few rewards, she struggles to match her desires with the role that society has set for her (even her name means “servant”). Though she is perhaps an unusual woman for her time, Bethia deals with her situation in a way that feels authentic to the period—as do the people around her, even those who love her. Her father’s pleasure in her learning, for example, “was of a fleeting kind—the reaction one might have if a cat were to walk about on its hind legs. You smile at the oddity but find the gait ungainly and not especially attractive,” Bethia muses.

Though Caleb is also seen as an oddity, his gender still gives him more privileges than Bethia, and though she’s proud of him she can’t help but resent this injustice, especially as her personal trials and tribulations mount.

“I think it’s a slightly arrogant view to imagine that it’s only in our lifetime that women have had the wit to see that their lot stank,” Brooks says, citing examples like the poet Anne Bradstreet as well as multiple court cases from the period that involve women speaking up for themselves “in ways that are very recognizable to second-wave old feminists like myself. So whenever anyone says, your women are ahead of their time, I tell them, go and read more 17th-century women!”

Readers will come away from Caleb’s Crossing with a new appreciation for this time in American history, and an interest in the Wampanoag people, who are going through something of a renaissance these days. Tiffany Smalley will be the first Wampanoag from the Gay Head Aquina Tribe since Caleb to graduate from Harvard later this month. And thanks to a MacArthur genius grant, Jessie Little Doe Baird has resurrected Wopanaak, the language of the Wampanoag, which had been lost for several generations. “When the tribe’s medicine man died the year before last, the language was heard on the cliffs at his graveside ceremony, probably for the first time in very many years,” Brooks says.

Perhaps we’ll get to hear that language in the film version of Caleb’s Crossing—though the novel hasn’t been optioned for film yet, Brooks is hard at work on a screenplay. “Previously I didn’t want to have anything to do with it, and I would just sling the option in the direction of the West Coast and not think about it anymore, but this one I felt very strongly about and I had such a strong visual sense of it. It just so happened that a friend of mine, who actually knows how to do this, was between projects, so we’ve been collaborating on it. Even if nothing comes of it, I feel that I’ve learned an immense amount from the process of doing it.

Brooks is also finishing up her selections as editor of Best American Short Stories 2011 (she was working on the introduction just before our talk). “I’ve got them all scattered at my feet now and I’m looking down and remembering what the very specific pleasures of each [story] were. It was a wonderful exercise, because I started it with a high heart and finished it in a complete state of moral collapse!” Reading 120 stories (she chose about 20 for the collection) also introduced her to new favorites. “I’m absolutely embarrassed to say I didn’t know Steven Millhauser before this!”

In a novel that so carefully dissects the joy and pain of learning, it seems natural to ask Brooks what she thinks about knowledge and its boundaries. Not surprisingly for a trained journalist, she doesn’t believe there should be any.

“I’m a big supporter of Julian Assange, let’s just put that out there,” she says laughingly of the WikiLeaks founder. “It’s not for anybody to tell anyone what they’re entitled to know. Put the information out there and let the chips fall where they may.”

Jennifer Haigh’s fourth novel focuses on a complicated Boston family struggling to come to terms with secrets they would rather not face. The Irish-American McGann clan have always been close, but when oldest brother Art, a priest, is accused of improper behavior by a parishioner, their mother and his two siblings find their close relationships torn apart. Combining a ripped-from-the-headlines plot with Haigh’s trademark emotionally elegant writing, Faith is a gripping and honest novel that will keep readers turning pages.

The word “faith” means a lot of different things to different people. What exactly does “faith” mean to you? Why did you choose it as the title of your book?

The novel deals with religious faith, of course—the story revolves around a priest accused of sexual abuse, and many of the characters are observant Catholics. In a broader sense, the events of the story make all the characters reevaluate what they believe about themselves and each other.

Many authors take inspiration from their own lives—your second novel, Baker Towers, was set in a western Pennsylvania coal town much like the place where you were born. Where did the idea for Faith come from?

When I moved to Boston from Iowa in 2002, the city was reeling from revelations that Catholic priests had molested children, and that the Archdiocese had covered up the abuse. I was reeling too: I was raised in a Catholic family, spent 12 years in parochial schools and had extremely fond memories of my interactions with Catholic clergy. It’s no exaggeration to say that nuns and priests were the heroes of my childhood. Like many people, I was horrified by what had happened in Boston—and, as later became clear, in Catholic dioceses across the country. Faith was my attempt to explain the inexplicable, to understand what I couldn’t make sense of in any other way.

What is it about family dynamics that makes them such a literary touchstone for you?

You know, I wouldn’t say I have a particular interest in writing about families. In fact I’m just trying to write complex, realistic, well-developed characters—and to do that, I need to consider where my characters came from, what their early years were like, what sorts of people brought them into the world.

Faith revolves around what happens when a young priest is accused of sexual misconduct with a young boy. Was it difficult for you to tackle such a sensitive subject?

Starting any book is difficult. I approached Faith the way I have approached all my novels: by thinking my way into the characters, and knowing them from the inside.

One of the things that is so impressive about your novels is how atmospheric they are. Faith takes place in Boston, which is where you currently live—if you could travel and settle anywhere with the intention of some day setting a book there, where would you choose to go?

Hm. Is someone else buying my plane ticket?

Your novels are very emotionally investing for readers, so they must demand a lot from you as a writer. What do you do when you need to unwind from all the drama you create on the page?!

I like to take a walk, or maybe cook something.

You graduated with an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 2002—what is the most important thing that you learned during your time there?

Iowa was a formative experience for me. I grew a great deal as a writer, and learned values and habits I use every day of my writing life. It’s hard to single out one particular lesson. I will say that Frank Conroy was a man who honored the sentence, and I try to do that too.

Along with novels you also write short stories—do you find one format more rewarding or challenging than the other?

Different rewards, different challenges. I enjoy both and struggle with both. If pressed I’d say I prefer the novel, mostly because I hate starting and finishing. Breaking ground on a new project terrifies me, and finishing one is profoundly depressing, if only because I know I’ll soon have to start all over again. My favorite part is the long, boring middle stage of writing a novel, when the end is still distant, and the next beginning even more so.

Recently there has been a lot of attention devoted to gender bias in the publishing industry. Your previous works have won some rather prestigious awards, but as a female author, do you feel like you have a harder time reaching a broad readership?

No—in fact, just the opposite. Reaching a broad audience isn’t the problem. If anything, female writers have an edge in that regard, since the vast majority of fiction readers are women. The real issue is that female writers are far less likely to be reviewed, which creates the impression that their work is less serious. This is a persistent and vexing problem, but because I can’t do anything about it, I try to put it out of my mind.

With so many other modern innovations and ways to spend our time, why is it important for people to still read books?

I can only respond with the reasons I still read books: It’s the most powerful way I know to augment the experience of living. Reading a great novel opens an entire world to me; it lets me inhabit another person’s skin. Of course, movies tell stories too; but as a viewer you’re a passive recipient of the experience; your own imagination has no hand in creating it.