Autorentext
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.

Klappentext

**“A touching, inventive novel about belonging and loss” (People) from the critically beloved, New York Times bestselling author of The Tiger’s Wife and *Inland

“I marveled at the subtle beauty and precision of Obreht’s prose. . . Read in the context of today’s conflicts and injustices, climate emergencies, and political and racial divisions—together more dystopian than any dystopian novel—the book surprised me most with its undercurrent of hope.”—Jessamine Chan, author of The School for Good Mothers, in The New York Times (Editors’ Choice)

A LIT HUB AND CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • SHORTLISTED FOR THE CLIMATE FICTION PRIZE • LONGLISTED FOR THE JOYCE CAROL OATES PRIZE

There’s the world you can see. And then there’s the one you can’t. Welcome to 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. Silvia 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 where she lives is now half-underwater. Silvia 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 Silvia’s lonely and impoverished reality.

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

Startling, inventive, and profoundly moving, 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.

Leseprobe
Long ago, before the desert, when my mother and I first arrived in Island City, we moved to a tower called the Morningside, where my aunt had already been serving as superintendent for about ten years.

The Morningside had been the jewel of an upper-city neighborhood called Battle Hill for more than a century. Save for the descendants of a handful of its original residents, however, the tower was, and looked, deserted. It reared above the park and the surrounding townhomes with just a few lighted windows skittering up its black edifice like notes of an unfinished song, here-and-there brightness all the way to the thirtythird floor, where Bezi Duras’s penthouse windows blazed, day and night, in all directions.

By the time we arrived, most people, especially those for whom such towers were intended, had fled the privation and the rot and the rising tide and gone upriver to scattered little freshwater townships. Those holding fast in the city belonged to one of two groups: people like my aunt and my mother and me, refuge seekers recruited from abroad by the federal Repopulation Program to move in and sway the balance against total urban abandonment, or the stalwart handful of locals hanging on in their shrinking neighborhoods, convinced that once the right person was voted into the mayor’s office and the tide pumps got working again, things would at least go back to the way they had always been.

The Morningside had changed hands a number of times and was then in the care of a man named Popovich. He was from Back Home, in the old country, which was how my aunt had come to work for him.

Ena was our only living relative—or so I assumed, because she was the only one my mother ever talked about, the one in whose direction we were always moving as we ticked around the world. As a result, she had come to occupy valuable real estate in my imagination. This was helped by the fact that my mother, who never volunteered intelligence of any kind, had given me very little from which to assemble my mental prototype of her. There were no pictures of Ena, no stories. I wasn’t even sure if she was my mother’s aunt, or mine, or just a sort of general aunt, related by blood to nobody. The only time I’d spoken to her, when we called from Paraiso to share the good news that our Repopulation papers had finally come through, my mother had waited until the line began to ring before whispering, “Remember, her wife just died, so don’t forget to mention Beanie,” before thrusting the receiver into my hand. I’d never even heard of the wife, this “Beanie” person, until that very moment.

For eight long years I’d been conjuring Ena out of nothing— and I’d come up with a version of her that really suited me: a tall, flowing, vulpine sort of person, generous and chuckling and mantled in benevolence. Imagine my disappointment when she turned out to be short, loud, and incredibly illpracticed at speaking to eleven-year-old nieces.

“My God, Silvia” was the first thing she said to me face-to face, standing out there by the Morningside gate with her camera while my mother and I dragged our suitcases up the hill. “Are we going to have enough rations for you?”

It was impossible to tell whether she felt I should have more or less than I was already getting. Something about her tone implied that she might be able to secure a grander breakfast than I was used to, the kind I’d only ever read about—pastries and jam, maybe even eggs. But, of course, Island City was adhering to its own version of Posterity measures, and breakfast here was a roll of the dice, just as it was in every other place we’d ever lived. Sometimes it was government tea and canned mush. Sometimes a loaf of bread and a suspect egg to share between two or three or four people. Whatever your ration card happened to say when it refreshed in the morning—assuming your local convenience store could even fulfill the request.

Ena lived in the battered little two-bedroom superintendent’s suite on the tenth floor of the Morningside. The place was furnished with scrounged items: a haphazardly reupholstered sofa, a small dining table surrounded by chairs in different states of refurbishment, a jungle of ferns and ivies Ena had found abandoned on the sidewalk and nursed back to abundance. The bay, gray and brackish, filled the view from our window. On low-tide days you could see the old freeway, which had once run just west of the building. Every now and again, a barge would get stuck between the submerged guardrails, and the whole neighborhood would descend to the waterline to watch its rescue, reminding you that the city was not as empty as it seemed.

My mother a…