Books by Olga Tokarczuk

“The Nobel Prize-winner returns with what has been described variously as ‘a satirical take’ and ‘a feminist twist’ on Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. In Tokarczuk’s version, an engineering student retires to a sanatorium for tuberculosis sufferers, in Silesia, 1913. Every evening, the residents gather to drink the local hallucinogenic liquor and debate life, the universe, and everything. But there’s something unsettling going on in the woods outside the walls.” Read more...

Notable Novels of Fall 2024

Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor

“This book is attempting to embrace an entire world and culture, a particular period in Poland and Eastern Europe, and fold it into everything that can be known. It is a maximalist novel in that sense. There’s the theology of it, but also how market garden towns worked, how peasants lived, what beliefs people had and how those were challenged or changed. Both The Books of Jacob and A New Name are dealing with the numinous, a sense of God. But Jacob Frank is an apostate, he’s someone who is prepared to overturn centuries of his own religion in an attempt to create something new. Thanks to Olga—through Jenny—we get to witness this vast pageant of what it means to have lived through that time in Poland. It’s like a very, very large Bayeux Tapestry. But also, what it is to look back on that, given what we know now, because there are outside observers.” Read more...

The Best of World Literature: The 2022 International Booker Prize Shortlist

Frank Wynne, Translator

“It’s a murder mystery, and therefore it rattles along, but it’s also a philosophical contemplation on man’s relationship with the natural world, and our relationships to those that we deem to be marginal—at the edge of society—and how we react to them…The title is taken from lines of William Blake and there are passages throughout where characters celebrate Blake’s ideas and philosophies. So it’s incredibly rich, and it’s really transportive, both metaphysically and physically. You feel like you’re inhabiting the spaces and landscapes that are being described. We didn’t know what to expect, and we were all absolutely blown away by it. “ Read more...

The Best Novels in Translation: the 2019 Booker International Prize

Bettany Hughes, Broadcaster