Description

In September 1913, a young Pole suffering from tuberculosis arrives at Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen, a health resort in the Silesian mountains. Every evening the residents gather to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur and debate the great issues of the day: monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women born inferior? War or peace? Meanwhile, disturbing things are happening in the guesthouse and the surrounding hills. Someone – or something – seems to be watching, attempting to infiltrate this cloistered world. Little does the newcomer realize, as he tries to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target. A century after the publication of The Magic Mountain, Olga Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann territory and lays claim to it, blending horror story, comedy, folklore and feminist parable with brilliant storytelling.

Publisher Review

'A magnificent writer.' - Svetlana Alexievich, 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate 'A writer on the level of W. G. Sebald.' - Annie Proulx, author of The Shipping News 'Olga Tokarczuk is inspired by maps and a perspective from above, which tends to make her microcosmos a mirror of macrocosmos. She constructs her novels in a tension between cultural opposites: nature versus culture, reason versus madness, male versus female, home versus alienation.' - Nobel Committee for Literature 'One among a very few signal European novelists of the past quarter-century.' - The Economist '[A] visionary novel ... Tokarczuk is wrestling with the biggest philosophical themes: the purpose of life on earth, the nature of religion, the possibility of redemption, the fraught and terrible history of eastern European Jewry. With its formidable insistence on rendering an alien world with as much detail as possible, the novel reminded me at times of Paradise Lost. The vividness with which it's done is amazing. At a micro-level, she sees things with a poetic freshness.... The Books of Jacob, which is so demanding and yet has so much to say about the issues that rack our times, will be a landmark in the life of any reader with the appetite to tackle it.' - Marcel Theroux, Guardian (praise for The Books of Jacob) 'The Books of Jacob is a spellbinding epic, one of the great literary achievements of the decade: a poetically brimful recreation of the world of a Jewish false messiah in 18th-century Poland, but beyond as well to mystically drawn priests and errant aristocrats. Charged with a sensuous immediacy it's the kind of hypnotic novel you not so much read as dwell in, and which then, magically, comes to dwell in you.' - Simon Schama, Financial Times (praise for The Books of Jacob) 'Drive Your Plow is exhilarating in a way that feels fierce and private, almost inarticulable; it's one of the most existentially refreshing novels I've read in a long time.' - Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker (praise for Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead) 'Tokarczuk's novels, poems and short stories consistently open up unpredictable wonders and astonishments, and there isn't a genre that she can't subvert. ... Antonia Lloyd-Jones pulls off a flawless, intimate translation, even tackling the technically dazzling feat of presenting Blake's poems as translations from English into Polish, back into English. ... [Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead] will make you want to read everything that Tokarczuk has written.' - Financial Times (praise for Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead) 'Flights works like a dream does: with fragmentary trails that add up to a delightful reimagining of the novel itself.' - Marlon James, author of A Brief History of Seven Killings (praise for Flights) 'It's a busy, beautiful vexation, this novel, a quiver full of fables of pilgrims and pilgrimages, and the reasons - the hidden, the brave, the foolhardy - we venture forth into the world.... The book is transhistorical, transnational; it leaps back and forth through time, across fiction and fact. Interspersed with the narrator's journey is a constellation of discrete stories that share rhyming motifs and certain turns of phrase.... In Jennifer Croft's assured translation, each self-enclosed account is tightly conceived and elegantly modulated, the language balletic, unforced.' - Parul Sehgal, New York Times (praise for Flights)