House of Day, House of Night: A Novel by Olga Tokarczuk translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Staff pick
In a small Silesian village straddling borders and time, reality blurs with the dream world in this "constellation novel" of fragmented stories, recipes, and local myths. This book explores how history and the supernatural seep into the mundane. It is a stunning meditation on place, memory, faith, community—and mushrooms. — Chris

A novel about the rich stories of small places, from the Nobel Prize–winning, New York Times bestselling author of The Books of Jacob and Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead

A woman settles in a remote Polish village where she knows no one. It has few inhabitants, but it teems with the stories of the living and the 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 Tokarczuk’s 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.