House of Day, House of Night

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.

Short-listed for International Dublin Literary Award 2004 (Ireland)

‘Darkly humorous, deadly serious, and with a quirky cast of characters that will stay with you forever, this is definitely not to be missed.’

‘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.’

‘The pleasures of Tokarczuk’s prose are in the neat little tricks of noticing, veering into the supernatural and strange.’

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.

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