From the author of The Tiger's Wife and Inland. When Silvia and her mother finally land in a place called Island City, after being expelled from their ancestral home in a not-too-distant future, they end up living and working at The Morningside, a crumbling luxury tower where Silvia's aunt, Ena, has been serving as the superintendent. Silvia feels unmoored in her life because her mother has been so diligently secretive about the family's past. But in Ena there is an opening: a person willing to give a young girl glimpses into the folktales of her demolished homeland in the Old World, a place of natural beauty and communal spirit that is lacking in Silvia's new home. As Silvia begins seeing the world with magical possibilities, she becomes obsessed with the mysterious woman who lives in the penthouse of the Morningside, with three massive Rottweilers who may or may not be more than they appear. Silvia's mission to unravel the truth about this woman's life, and her own haunted past, will transform her own life in the most unexpected of ways.
This fairy-tale register is just one of many modes of storytelling that seep into The Morningside. The book’s grimly familiar vision of the environmentally devastated near future places it alongside recent 'cli-fi' by Claire Vaye Watkins and Lydia Millet ... The narrative has the mysterious, intoxicating pull of classic children’s books...Sil’s story is an adventure that is at times so captivating that we can briefly forget that it’s an elegy ... Obreht doesn’t say exactly what those debts are—instead, she lets the diminished world of the novel, like the future our younger generations will face, speak for itself. It seems darkly appropriate that she wrote this novel while pregnant during the pandemic ... where flights of invention made The Tiger’s Wife tilt toward allegory, the textures of The Morningside—a familiar city, a familiar crisis, a familiar complacency—make this future feel closer, shot through with an almost excruciating intimacy. Here, storytelling is not a way of relating to a mythical past but of growing up in the long middest, when the idea of home and the promise of safety are harder and harder to hold on to every day.
Elegant, effortless world-building ... Immensely satisfying twists ... Throughout, I marveled at the subtle beauty and precision of Obreht’s prose ... By weaving in folklore and ample wonder, Obreht gives her climate fiction ancient roots, forcing us to reckon with the ruined world that future generations will inherit, while reminding us that even in the face of catastrophe, there’s solace to be found in art.
Try to read 10 pages of this book and resist its fairy dust. This story sinks the reader into its dreamlike world as surely as the Morningside subsides into the island it occupies ... Obreht is a pure, natural storyteller with a direct hotline to the collective unconsciousness. She blends humor and tragedy, warmth and grit, mystery and magic, constructing her plot out of human curiosity and connection. She writes like she belongs to some lineage of storytellers who entertained around campfires, with such surefootedness that a reader knows all the odd elements and striking characters she introduces will weave together into a haunting and meaningful tale. With reality growing uncannier by the day, we need a novelist like Obreht who can imagine the fortune of our species in a way that feels authentic. In the world she envisions, there is loss, but beauty remains.
