House of Day, House of Night

An extraordinary novel reminiscent of the prize-winning Flights and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, from the renowned Polish author and winner of the Nobel Prize.

A brilliantly imaginative novel about the rich stories that abound in a small village, by Nobel Prize-winning Olga Tokarczuk, one of the most daring and ambitious contemporary novelists.

When a young woman, the narrator of House of Day, House of Night, arrives in a remote village in southwest Poland, she knows no one. Before long, she discovers that everyone-and everything-there has a story. With the help of her neighbour, the eccentric Marta, she pieces together fragments of the living and the dead. There's the drunk Marek Marek, who discovers 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; the lover who switches genders; and the former teacher who realises he is a wolf and donates copious amounts of blood. From the founding of the town to the lives of its saints, these stories capture not only a history but a cosmology.

Another brilliant 'constellation novel', like Tokarczuk's Booker Prize-winning Flights, House of Day, House of Night interweaves vignettes of history, recipes, gossip, and mythology, reminding us that the stories of any place, no matter how humble, are fascinating and boundless, and await any of us with the imagination to seek it.

About the Author

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.