Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

A magnificent writer. Svetlana Alexievich, 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Though the book functions perfectly as noir crime moving towards a denouement that, for sleight of hand and shock, should draw admiration from the most seasoned Christie devotee its chief preoccupation is with unanswerable questions of free will versus determinism, and with existential unease.... In Antonia Lloyd-Joness translation, the prose is by turns witty and melancholy, and never slips out of that distinctive narrative voice.... That this novel caused such a stir in Poland is no surprise. There, the political compass has swung violently to the right, and the rights of women and of animals are under attack (the novels 2017 film adaptation, Spoor, caused one journalist to remark that it was a deeply anti-Christian film that promoted eco-terrorism). It is an astonishing amalgam of thriller, comedy and political treatise, written by a woman who combines an extraordinary intellect with an anarchic sensibility. Sarah Perry, Guardian One among a very few signal European novelists of the past quarter-century. The Economist Aspects of dark fantasy permeate Olga Tokarczuks grimly comic tale of death and vengeance, set in a remote forested plateau on the border between two realms, with a cast of intelligent animals, ghostly apparitions, celestial influence and humans who resemble trolls, witches, giants and goblins.... Translated with virtuosic precision and wit by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Tokarczuks prescient, provocative and furiously comic fiction seethes with a Blakean conviction of the cleansing power of rage: the vengeance of the weak when justice is denied.... [An] elegantly subversive novel. Jane Shilling, New Statesman Drive Your Plow is exhilarating in a way that feels fierce and private, almost inarticulable; its one of the most existentially refreshing novels Ive read in a long time. Jia Tolentino, New Yorker Amusing, stimulating and intriguing ... [Drive Your Plow] might be likened to Fargo as rewritten by Thomas Mann, or a W. G. Sebald version of The Mousetrap. Olga Tokarczuks previous novel, Flights ... was the winner of the Man Booker International Prize, for translated fiction, and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, though smaller in scale, will help confirm her position as the first Polish writer to command sustained Western attention since the end of the Cold War. Leo Robson, The Telegraph Janina is such an unusual, engaging narrator that her nihilism is strangely cheering; this was one of the funniest books of the year. Justine Jordan, Books of the Year 2018, Guardian Strange, mordantly funny, consoling and wise, Olga Tokarczuks novels fill the readers mind with intimations of a unique consciousness. Her latest novel to be translated into English, Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of The Dead is simultaneously unsettling and oddly companionable. Suffused with William Blake, astrological lore, and the landscapes of middle Europe, its both a meditation on human compassion and a murder mystery that lingers in the imagination. Marcel Theroux, author of Strange Bodies I loved this wry, richly melancholic philosophical mystery. Its a compelling and endlessly thought-provoking novel, luminous with the strangeness of existence. Megan Hunter, author of The End We Start From

Olga Tokarczuk is the author of nine novels, three short story collections and has been translated into thirty languages. Her novel Flights won the 2018 International Booker Prize, in Jennifer Crofts translation, and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead was shortlisted for International Booker Prize the following year. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2019.