Claudia

Claudia is the main character of the novel. When the novel opens, she is an elderly woman dying in a nursing home and aspiring to write a history of the world intertwined with a history of her own life. That work is Moon Tiger itself. The novel is composed of her own memories as well as the same events recounted from the perspectives of other participants. Her history is not told chronologically, but instead jumps around in a pattern dictated by Claudia’s free associations. We learn Claudia was a war correspondent in Egypt during World War II, where she met a military officer named Tom with whom she fell in love. The central trauma of Claudia’s life is she lost Tom as a war casualty and soon after miscarried their child. Despite having a core story, Claudia says repeatedly there is not a single Claudia but...