Téa Obreht is the most thrilling literary discovery in years

There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water - it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream.

It struck me that distant cities are designed precisely so you can know where you came from.

The tunnels of our lives connect, coming to daylight at the oddest moments, and then plunge us into the dark again. We return to the lives of those who have gone before us, a perplexing möbius strip until we come home, eventually, to ourselves.

And I suddenly think, as I look across the table at him, that these are the days as they will be. This is the future as we see it. The swerve and the static. The confidence and the doubt.

What was a life anyway? An accumulation of small shelves of incident.

I told him that I loved him and that I'd always love him and I felt like a child who throws a centavo into a fountain and then she has to tell someone her most extraordinary wish even though she knows that the wish should be kept secret and that, in telling it, she is quite probably losing it. He replied that I was not to worry, that the penny could come out of the fountain again and again and again.