If you're shopping for a mom who's also a member of the literati, you might want to surprise her with this, one of the hottest and most talked-about literary novels of the year. Téa Obreht is a debut novelist already named one of “20 under 40” notable fiction writers by The New Yorker. In her first novel Obreht, who was born in Belgrade and escaped the Balkan War as a child, serves up a tale of a young doctor in an unnamed country who must return to her grandfather's mountain village to discover if the stories he used to tell her are true. Monitor reviewer Yvonne Zipp says Obreht creates "a climate of wonder and horror right out of a fairy tale."
