Library Author Series: Téa Obreht
- Library Hall
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.
From the critically beloved, New York Times bestselling author of The Tiger’s Wife and Inland, a magical novel of mothers and daughters, displacement and belonging, and myths both old and new.
“The Morningside is a multi-faceted gift of a novel that only Tea Obreht could conjure onto paper—a prismatic exploration of how we survive with ongoing loss, how we build and rebuild meaning together in the wake of disaster, and how tomorrow's children might navigate a future world of profound uncertainty and precarity. Obreht is such an expert and generous storyteller, infusing The Morningside with the pleasures of folklore and fairytale while simultaneously diving into the deep silences and irreconcilable contradictions in adult stories about the past.”
-- award-winning author Karen Russell
About the Author
Téa Obreht was born in Belgrade, in the former Yugoslavia, and grew up in Cyprus and Egypt before eventually immigrating to the United States. Her debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife, won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction, and was a 2011 National Book Award finalist and an international bestseller. Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Non-Required Reading, and has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic, Vogue, Esquire and Zoetrope: All-Story, among many others. She was the recipient of the Rona Jaffe fellowship from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and a 2016 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, and was named by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty. From 2020 to 2022, she served as the Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at Texas State University in San Marcos. She currently lives in Wyoming.
Borrow The Morningside from Bud Werner Memorial Library.
Buy The Morningside from Steamboat Springs' independent bookstore, Off the Beaten Path.
Library Author Series
Bud Werner Memorial Library presents an ongoing program of free author talks throughout the year. A diverse range of award-winning authors continues to speak about their literary works and their writing processes. Each talk is followed by a Q&A, and books are available for sale courtesy of Off the Beaten Path Bookstore.