Téa Obreht

media release: 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. Sil 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 she lives in is now half-underwater. She 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 Sil’s lonely and impoverished reality.

The Morningside is at once a sweeping tale of mothers and daughters, a haunting and atmospheric look at a world affected by climate change, and an enchanting folktale of the future. Like its predecessors, Obreht’s latest examines the way people thrive in their imagination (what she calls “the necessity of a space between the real and the possible”), and considers how myths shape our families, and our perceptions of the world.

In conversation with Porter Shreve.