An extraordinary novel from Nobel Prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk, the renowned Polish author of Flights and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

A woman settles in a remote Polish village. It has few inhabitants, now, but it teems with the stories of its living and its dead. There’s the drunk Marek Marek, who discovers that he shares his body with a bird, and Franz Frost, whose nightmares come to him from a newly discovered planet. There’s the man whose death—with one leg on the Polish side, one on the Czech—was an international incident. And there are the Germans who still haunt a region that not long ago they called their own. From the founding of the town to the lives of its saints, these shards piece together not only a history but a cosmology.

Another brilliant ‘constellation novel’ in the mode of her International Booker Prize–winning Flights, House of Day, House of Night reminds us that the story of any place, no matter how humble, is boundless.

Details

ISBN13: 9781923058675
Format: Paperback / softback
Number of Pages: 304
Edition:
Publication Date:
Publisher: Text Publishing
Publication City, Country: Melbourne,Australia
Dimensions (cm): 23.4(H)x15.3(L)
Weight (gm):

Author Biography

Olga Tokarczuk is the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature and the International Booker Prize, among many other honours. She is the author of more than a dozen works of fiction, two collections of essays, and a children’s book; her work has been translated into more than fifty languages.

Reviews

‘Darkly humorous, deadly serious, and with a quirky cast of characters that will stay with you forever, this is definitely not to be missed.’

* Dua Lipa on Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead *

‘The Empusium is an emphatic triumph—a feast of culture, both literary and popular, highbrow and low, that shows Tokarczuk writing at the peak of her powers and enjoying every moment of it…I was in thrall to this from the first page.’

* Bram Presser, Sydney Morning Herald on The Empusium *

‘The pleasures of Tokarczuk’s prose are in the neat little tricks of noticing, veering into the supernatural and strange.’

* Saturday Paper *
‘House of Day, House of Night is packed with chewy philosophical ideas and spellbinding images.’ * Australian *
'The language in this novel is incredible. I found myself frequently putting the book down for a moment just to think about a particular word or phrase. This is my first Tokarczuk novel and I am thrilled to discover a writing style I love so much. I am going to read all Tokarczuk’s work that I can get my hands on.’ * Readings Monthly *
‘This is a very accessible place to start with Olga—the stories are lyrical and flowing while we spend our time learning about the different villagers, their connections to each other, who would we would be if we weren't people, and the conflicts of existence and inhabiting the world.’ * Better than Dead *