Flights

Flights, a novel about travel in the twenty-first century and human anatomy, is Olga Tokarczuk’s most ambitious to date. It interweaves travel narratives and reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion, and migration. From the seventeenth century, we have the story of the Dutch anatomist Philip Verheyen, who dissected and drew pictures of his own amputated leg. From the eighteenth century, we have the story of a North African-born slave turned Austrian courtier stuffed and put on display after his death. In the nineteenth century, we follow Chopin’s heart as it makes the covert journey from Paris to Warsaw. In the present we have the trials of a wife accompanying her much older husband as he teaches a course on a cruise ship in the Greek islands, and the harrowing story of a young husband whose wife and child mysteriously vanish on a holiday on a Croatian island. With her signature grace and insight, Olga Tokarczuk guides the reader beyond the surface layer of modernity and towards the core of the very nature of humankind.

Winner of 2018 International Booker Prize 2018 Winner of Nobel Prize in Literature 2018 (Sweden)

“'A writer on the level of W. G. Sebald.' -- Annie Proulx, author of The Shipping News 'A magnificent writer.' -- Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Prize in Literature laureate 2015 'One among a very few signal European novelists of the past quarter-century.' -- The Economist ' Flights could almost be an inventory of the ways narrative can serve a writer short of, and beyond, telling a story. The book's prose is a lucid medium in which narrative crystals grow to an ideal size, independent structures not disturbing the balance of the whole ... Much of the pleasure of reading Flights comes from the essay clusters embedded between sections of narratives ... The cascades of concise interstitial passages are often satisfying riffs on time and space, bodies and language, repetition and uniqueness ... Jennifer Croft's translation is exceptionally adventurous ... she can give the impression, not of passing on meanings long after the event, but of being the present at the moment when language reached out to thought.' -- Adam Mars-Jones, London Review of Books 'An indisputable masterpiece of "controlled psychosis"... Punctuated by maps and figures, the discursive novel is reminiscent of the work of Sebald. The threads ultimately converge in a remarkable way, making this an extraordinary accomplishment.' -- Publishers Weekly , STARRED review 'In the vein of W. G. Sebald, Flights knits together snippets of fiction, narrative and reflection to meditate on human anatomy and the meaning of travel: this is a delicate, ingenious book that is constantly making new connections.' -- Justine Jordan, Guardian 'Tokarczuk is one of Europe's most daring and original writers, and this astonishing performance is her glittering, bravura entry in the literature of ideas. ... A select few novels possess the wonder of music, and this is one of them. No two readers will experience it exactly the same way. Flights is an international, mercurial, and always generous book, to be endlessly revisited. Like a glorious, charmingly impertinent travel companion, it reflects, challenges, and rewards.' -- Eileen Battersby, Los Angeles Review of Books 'A welcome introduction to a major author and a pleasure for fans of contemporary European literature.' -- Kirkus 'Tokarczuk reads like a more cerebral W.G. Sebald in this work: Whereas what lingers of Sebald's works are the emotions he conjures up, what lingers of Tokarczuk are her ideas.' -- Nadia Padilla, The Millions 'Flights is a humanistic text, one unafraid of sorrow and pain, nor of wisdom and humor. Tokarczuk's writing is endlessly penetrating and revelatory. Unlike the maps and guidebooks it scorns, it never attempts to reach easy definition or clear meaning, and it's through this refusal to answer its own questions--about who people are or what the world is like--that it gains its power, its awestriking scope and fractal, refractive insights.' -- Jonathan Wlodarski, Music & Literature 'An unclassifiable medley of linked fictions and essays, the book occupies no fixed setting or place in time and its travels obey no established itinerary. Given a clear, welcoming translation by Jennifer Croft, its qualities are "fluidity, mobility, illusoriness."' -- Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal”

‘A magnificent writer.’
— Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Prize in Literature laureate 2015

‘A writer on the level of W. G. Sebald.’ 
— Annie Proulx, author of The Shipping News

‘One among a very few signal European novelists of the past quarter-century.’
— The Economist

‘Flights works like a dream does: with fragmentary trails that add up to a delightful reimagining of the novel itself.’
— Marlon James, author of A Brief History of Seven Killings

‘The best novel I’ve read in years is Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights (trans. Jennifer Croft): Most great writers build a novel as one would a beautiful house, brick by brick, wall by wall, from the ground up. Or using another metaphor, a writer gathers her yarn, and with good needles and structure, knits a wonderful sweater or scarf. I tend to prefer novels where a writer weaves her threads this way and that, above and below, inside outside, and ends up with a carpet. Flights is such a novel.’
— Rabih Alameddine, author of An Unnecessary Woman

‘Flights could almost be an inventory of the ways narrative can serve a writer short of, and beyond, telling a story. The book’s prose is a lucid medium in which narrative crystals grow to an ideal size, independent structures not disturbing the balance of the whole … Much of the pleasure of reading Flights comes from the essay clusters embedded between sections of narratives ... The cascades of concise interstitial passages are often satisfying riffs on time and space, bodies and language, repetition and uniqueness … Jennifer Croft’s translation is exceptionally adventurous … she can give the impression, not of passing on meanings long after the event, but of being present at the moment when language reached out to thought.’
— Adam Mars-Jones, London Review of Books

‘Olga Tokarczuk is a household name in Poland and one of Europe’s major humanist writers, working here in the continental tradition of the “thinking” or essayistic novel. Flights has echoes of WG Sebald, Milan Kundera, Danilo Kiš and Dubravka Ugreši?, but Tokarczuk inhabits a rebellious, playful register very much her own.... Flights is a passionate and enchantingly discursive plea for meaningful connectedness, for the acceptance of “fluidity, mobility, illusoriness”. After all, Tokarczuk reminds us, “Barbarians don’t travel. They simply go to destinations or conduct raids.” Hotels on the continent would do well to have a copy of Flights on the bedside table. I can think of no better travel companion in these turbulent, fanatical times.’
— Kapka Kassabova, Guardian

‘It’s a busy, beautiful vexation, this novel, a quiver full of fables of pilgrims and pilgrimages, and the reasons — the hidden, the brave, the foolhardy — we venture forth into the world.... The book is transhistorical, transnational; it leaps back and forth through time, across fiction and fact. Interspersed with the narrator’s journey is a constellation of discrete stories that share rhyming motifs and certain turns of phrase.... In Jennifer Croft’s assured translation, each self-enclosed account is tightly conceived and elegantly modulated, the language balletic, unforced.’
— Parul Sehgal, New York Times

‘Tokarczuk is one of Europe’s most daring and original writers, and this astonishing performance is her glittering, bravura entry in the literature of ideas.... A select few novels possess the wonder of music, and this is one of them. No two readers will experience it exactly the same way. Flights is an international, mercurial, and always generous book, to be endlessly revisited. Like a glorious, charmingly impertinent travel companion, it reflects, challenges, and rewards.’
— Eileen Battersby, Los Angeles Review of Books

Olga Tokarczuk is the author of nine novels, three short story collections and has been translated into thirty languages. Her novel Flights won the 2018 International Booker Prize, in Jennifer Croft’s translation. In 2019, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. 

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