The next book by a Rare Mags favourite author. This one is written in short chapters building a world in a town. Every person leaks into the world and to your head. Some characters repeat and centre the narrative, some feature once and never again. Alongside the classic Tokarczuk humour, unsettling doom and beautiful prose, this book was a weirdly relaxing read. I found myself dipping in and out but always picking it back up, wondering what happens next. Fully recommend.
A woman settles in a remote Polish village. It has few inhabitants, 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 is a brilliantly imaginative epic novel of a small place by Olga Tokarczuk, one of the most daring and ambitious novelists of our time.