Moon Tiger is the story of Claudia Hampton, an intelligent and deeply flawed woman whose life is chronicled from various points-of-view that shift freely between past and present. The book opens with Claudia, elderly and irascible, making plans to write a history of the world from her room in a nursing home. Having had a long career as a writer of popular histories, Claudia is well equipped for the task, and Moon Tiger itself can be seen as the world history of Claudia’s ambitions. This identification is not obvious. On a superficial reading, the novel is simply the story of Claudia Hampton, and nuanced and penetrating though it may be, it does not approach the breadth of a global history. But it is precisely by making this identification that the book’s themes come into relief: the ephemera of memory, the unrelenting march of time, the fragility of any single human perspective, and the collectivity of historical narrative.