Olga Tokarczuk’s existential thriller was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2019. A firm fan favourite, it is a darkly funny and thought-provoking novel that asks: who really holds power in the natural world?
Olga Tokarczuk is a Polish writer and activist, and one of the most critically acclaimed and successful authors of her generation.
She was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for a narrative imagination that with encyclopaedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life’. Her novel Flights, translated by Jennifer Croft, won the International Booker Prize in 2018. She is the author of nine novels and three short-story collections and has been translated into more than 50 languages.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead was written in 2009 and translated into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones in 2018. It was later shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2019. Set in a bleak Polish mid-winter, it follows Janina Duszejko, an eccentric woman in her 60s, who describes the events surrounding the disappearance of her two dogs. When members of a local hunting club are subsequently found murdered, she becomes obsessed with the investigation. As the body count rises, Janina begins to suspect that something stranger is afoot. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is an existential thriller that is also a novel of ideas, asking probing questions about sanity, social injustice, animal rights, hypocrisy, religion and belief in predestination – and caused a genuine political uproar when released in Tokarczuk’s native Poland.
