The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht - USED

Set in war-torn Yugoslavia, The Tiger's Wife is a tale steeped in local fables and driven by one woman's experience of the never-ending violence that swept the Balkans. As Natalia and a friend travel across the former Yugoslavia, immunizing villagers, the body of her grandfather turns up in a hospital in the middle of nowhere. She and her family have no idea why. Recalling stories he told her as a child, she becomes convinced that he went in search of the Deathless Man, a mythical figure, that her grandfather claimed to have met a number of times in his life. In her quest to find out how her grandfather, a man of hard fact and science, could turn to this fantasy, she discovers something particular about his childhood: a tiger escaped from a zoo during Word War II bombings and wandered deep into the woods, settling just outside his peasant village. It terrorized the town, the devil incarnate to everyone, except for her grandfather and 'the tiger's wife'...