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.

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.

Antonia Lloyd-Jones is an award-winning translator of Polish fiction, reportage, poetry, and children’s books. A longtime mentor for the UK's Emerging Translators’ Mentorship Program, she is also a former co-chair of the UK Translators Association.

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