An extraordinary novel from Nobel Prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk, the renowned Polish author of Flights and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead – ‘Darkly humorous, deadly serious, and with a quirky cast of characters that will stay with you forever, this is definitely not to be missed.’
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.
Praise for Olga Tokarczuk
‘The Empusium is an emphatic triumph—a feast of culture, both literary and popular, highbrow and low, that shows Tokarczuk writing at the peak of her powers and enjoying every moment of it…I was in thrall to this from the first page.’ Sydney Morning Herald
‘The pleasures of Tokarczuk’s prose are in the neat little tricks of noticing, veering into the supernatural and strange.’ Saturday Paper
‘Boy this is so good. This is so good.’ ABC Radio National The Bookshelf
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 has translated works by many of Poland’s leading contemporary novelists and reportage authors, as well as crime fiction, poetry and children’s books. Her translation of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by 2018 Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk was shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International prize. For ten years she was a mentor for the Emerging Translators’ Mentorship Programme, and is a former co-chair of the UK Translators Association.
AVAILABLE: 16 SEP 2025 Fiction Paperback, 304pp AU $34.99 / NZ $40.00 ISBN 9781923058675
