Primeval and Other Times

From one the world’s greatest living writers, recently featured on Dua Lipa's book club, a fable-like novel charting Poland’s turbulent twentieth century through the life of a mythical village.

The Nobel Prize winner at her earthiest and most ethereal, in a fictional journey through three generations in the life of a mythical Polish village.

For the denizens of Primeval, the world beyond its fields and forests is but a dream. The outcast Cornspike raises her daughter among the creatures and spirits of the forest. The squire Popielski loses his faith and becomes obsessed with a game where progress is attained only by dreaming the right kind of dream. Nonhuman beings—trees and mushrooms and archangels—have their stories, or Times, too, as do inanimate objects, which may be ‘more important for the world than people.’ Yet their Times are buffeted by the feral history of the twentieth century, after war carries Michal the miller away from his family in 1914. Bloodshed, betrayal, and the dramas of daily life mark the birth, life, and decline of Primeval’s little world and Times, making us consider afresh the stories by which we comprehend our own.

Rich with the capaciousness and imagination that have brought Tokarczuk to sustained international fame, Primeval and Other Times is yet another treasure for fans and new converts alike.

‘Just one of those books you need to read.’ Lit Hub on House of Day, House of Night

‘An international, mercurial, and always generous book, to be endlessly revisited.’ Los Angeles Review of Books on Flights

‘As brilliant and life-affirming as literature gets.’ Saturday Paper on Flights

About the Author

Olga Tokarczuk is the winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature and the Man Booker International Prize, for her novel Flights. She has received many other honours, including her country Poland’s highest literary award, the Nike, for both Flights and The Books of Jacob. Her novels Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead and House of Day, House of Night have also been highly praised.

She is the author of more than a dozen works of fiction, a children’s book and two collections of essays. Her work has been translated into more than fifty languages. Widely regarded as one of the most important writers of her generation, she lives in the countryside near Nowa Ruda, in south-western Poland.